Novel Quotes - Page 24

• I love the movies, and when I go to see a movie that's been made from one of my books, I know that it isn't going to be exactly like my novel because a lot of other people have interpreted it. But I also know it has an idea that I'll like because that idea occurred to me, and I spent a year, or a year and a half of my life working on it.

  Stephen King

  Movie, Book, Years

  "Biography/ Personal Quotes". www.imdb.com.

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• Being a novelist and being a mother have exactly coincided in my life: the call from my agent saying that I had a contract for my first novel - that was on my answering phone message when I got back from the hospital with my first child.

  Barbara Kingsolver

  Mother, Children, Phones

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• I never discuss a novel while I'm writing it, for fear that talking about it will diminish my desire to write it.

  Dean Koontz

  Writing, Talking, Desire

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• In my personal life, I'm a comic novel. But then, so are we all, because we're human beings.

  Dean Koontz

  Literature, Comic, Humans

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• A novel that does not uncover a hitherto unknown segment of existence is immoral. Knowledge is the novel's only morality.

  Milan Kundera

  Doe, Ethics, Morality

  New York Review of Books, July 19, 1984.

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• The light that radiates from the great novels time can never dim, for human existence is perpetually being forgotten by man and thus the novelists' discoveries, however old they may be, will never cease to astonish.

  Milan Kundera

  Men, Light, Discovery

  The Guardian, June 3, 1988.

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• The novelist teaches the reader to comprehend the world as a question. There is wisdom and tolerance in that attitude. In a world built on sacrosanct certainties the novel is dead.

  Milan Kundera

  Attitude, Tolerance, World

  "Siraaj: An Arab Tale". Book by Radwa Ashour, 2007.

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• I've written six novels and four pieces of nonfiction, so I don't really have a genre these days.

  Anne Lamott

  Pieces, Four, Nonfiction

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• Alice Adams wrote a sweet note to me after my first novel came out when I was 26, and I was so blown away that I sent her a bunch of stamps by return mail. I have no idea what I was thinking. It was a star-struck impulse.

  Anne Lamott

  Sweet, Stars, Thinking

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• I have resolved to pick one novel and just read it over and over again for the rest of my life, because I cannot remember anything anymore.

  Hugh Laurie

  Remember, Picks

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• Celebrity is absolutely preposterous. Entertainment seems to be inflating. It used to be the punctuation to your life, a film or a novel or a play, a way of celebrating a good week or month. Now it feels as if it's all punctuation.

  Hugh Laurie

  Play, Way, Months

  "Biography/ Personal Quotes". www.imdb.com.

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• The pleasure of writing fiction is that you are always spotting some new approach, an alternative way of telling a story and manipulating characters; the novel is such a wonderfully flexible form.

  Penelope Lively

  Writing, Character, Alternatives

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• If you're writing an opinion piece, it's your job to write your opinion. If, on the other hand, you wrote a novel, as Virginia Woolf tells us, it would be inappropriate if you let your novel be influenced by your political opinions.

  David Mamet

  Jobs, Writing, Political Opinions

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• A novel should be a book of questions, not a book of answers.

  Hilary Mantel

  Book, Answers, Should

  "A question of belief" by Hilary Mantel, www.theguardian.com. January 28, 2006.

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• I think it took me half a page of 'Wolf Hall' to think: 'This is the novel I should have been writing all along.'

  Hilary Mantel

  Writing, Thinking, Should Have

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• I'm a very organised and rational and linear thinker and you have to stop all that to write a novel.

  Hilary Mantel

  Writing, Linear, Rational

  "Hilary Mantel: 'If I'm suffering, I can make that pay'". Interview with Stuart Jeffries, www.theguardian.com. October 17, 2012.

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• Back in my 20s, when I wrote 'A Place of Greater Safety,' the French Revolution novel, I thought, 'I'll always have to write historical novels because I can't do plots.'' But in the six years of writing that novel, I actually learned to write, to invent things.

  Hilary Mantel

  Writing, Historical Novels, Years

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• I have some other novels I want to write. I have a lot of short stories - I love the short story.

  George R. R. Martin

  Writing, Stories, Want

  "George RR Martin: Barbarians at the gate". Interview with Alison Flood, www.theguardian.com. April 13, 2011.

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• I wanted to write a big novel, something epic in scale.

  George R. R. Martin

  Writing, Epic, Bigs

  "Personal Quotes/ Biography". www.imdb.com.

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• I've written some standalone novels, but a book series allows fans in. There's much more intense involvement.

  George R. R. Martin

  Book, Fans, Intense

  "George R. R. Martin talks 'Game of Thrones' as the HBO show's 'Daenerys' departs". Interview with Maureen Ryan, featuresblogs.chicagotribune.com. April 29, 2010.

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• You always try to do your own thing. One of the things I wanted to do was to write a book that combines some of the best traits of contemporary fantasy with some of the traits of the historical novel.

  George R. R. Martin

  Book, Writing, Historical Novels

  "Fantasy Author George R.R. Martin: Blood of Bayonne". Interview with Joanna Buffum and Dylan Runco, njmonthly.com. March 15, 2013.

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• I am writing my second novel for children for Simon and Schuster.

  Marlee Matlin

  Children, Writing, Second Chance

  "Interview with Marlee Matlin Actress and Academy Award Winner". Interview with Doug Beck, www.audiologyonline.com. October 18, 2004.

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• Lost Illusion is the undisclosed title of every novel.

  Andre Maurois

  Titles, Illusion, Lost

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• The really great novel tends to be the exact negative of its author's life.

  Andre Maurois

  Writing, Negative, Really Great

  "The Art of Writing". Book by Andre Maurois, 1960.

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• The suspense in a novel is not only in the reader, but in the novelist himself, who is intensely curious too about what will happen to the hero.

  Mary McCarthy

  Hero, Suspense Novels, Novelists

  "On the Contrary".

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