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Quotes about Novels

20 Picture Quotes

518 Written Quotes

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Novels, like human beings, usually have their beginnings in the dark. Votes: 4

Rita Mae Brown

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Novels are longer than life. Votes: 3

Natalie Clifford Barney

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Novels are make-believe and play for adults. Votes: 3

Mohsin Hamid

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Novels allow me to create a whole world. Votes: 3

Ntozake Shange

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Novels arise out of the shortcomings of History. Votes: 3

A. S. Byatt

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Novels without female characters were a lifeless desert. Votes: 3

Ian Mcewan

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Novels are . . . an unsurpassed form to understand people. Votes: 3

Henning Mankell

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Novels are to love as fairy tales to dreams. Votes: 3

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

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Novels are such mysterious and amorphous and tender things. Votes: 3

Arundhati Roy

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Novels are a marathon, while comic scripts are a sprint. Votes: 3

Duane Swierczynski

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Novels are about other people and poems are about yourself Votes: 3

Philip Larkin

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Novels must have verisimilitude, and truth has little enough of that. Votes: 3

Louis Auchincloss

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Novels teach the youthful mind to sigh after happiness that never existed. Votes: 3

Oliver Goldsmith

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Overnight Success Happens Only in Fairy Tales, Trashy Novels, and Bad Movies. Votes: 3

Ernie J Zelinski

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Novels, except as aids to masturbation, play no part in contemporary life. Votes: 3

Gore Vidal

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Novels often have leisurely openings; a TV drama needs an arresting opening. Votes: 3

Andrew Davies

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Every story we remember is a novel. Novels make things more universal. Votes: 3

Dave Eggers

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Novels are about men and women and children and dogs, not politics. Votes: 3

John Cheever

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Novels and gardens," she says. "I like to move from plot to plot. Votes: 3

Bill Richardson

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Novels seem to me to be richer, broader, deeper, more enjoyable than poems. Votes: 3

Philip Larkin

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"Novels and gardens," she says. "I like to move from plot to plot." Votes: 3

Bill Richardson

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Novels help us to resist the temptation to think of the past as deficient. Votes: 3

Ian Mcewan

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Novels as dull as dishwater, with the grease of random sentiments floating on top. Votes: 3

Italo Calvino

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Novels set in imaginary futures are necessarily about the moment in which they are written. Votes: 3

William Gibson

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Novels are readOr their authors are blue.Support Indie writers:Buy their books, post reviews! Votes: 3

Cheri Gillard

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Novels tend to end as the Paternoster begins: with the kingdom of God on earth. Votes: 3

Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel

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Novels written with film contracts in mind have a faint but unmistakable, and ruinous, odor. Votes: 3

Annie Dillard

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Do you write novels?" I said. "Novels, Lord no," she said. "I can't even stay married. Votes: 3

Pam Houston

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Novels begin, not on the page, but in meditation and day-dreaming - In thinking, not writing. Votes: 3

Joyce Carol Oates

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Novels are food for the leftover hours of life, the in-between times, the moments of waiting. Votes: 3

Young-Ha Kim

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Novels are a kind of experiment in selfhood, for the reader as well as for the author. Votes: 3

Jonathan Dee

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Novels are very different than films and I love to see someone else's imagining of my story. Votes: 3

Nicholas Sparks

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Novels demand a certain complexity of narrative and scope, so it's necessary for the characters to change. Votes: 3

Maria Semple

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Novels are the Socratic dialogues of our time. Practical wisdom fled from school wisdom into this liberal form. Votes: 3

Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel

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Novels seem to exist because of this need to know and connect, and so story becomes charged with necessity. Votes: 3

Michael Helm

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I'm an avid reader. Novels, non-fiction, comics, it doesn't matter. Best way in the world to feed your head. Votes: 3

Reid Scott

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Novels attempt to render human experience; that's really all they are. They are meant to convey empathy for the character. Votes: 3

Sue Monk Kidd

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Novels give you the matrix of emotions, give you the flavour of a time in a way formal history cannot. Votes: 3

Doris Lessing

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Novels are written, not wished into existence. You have to sit your ass in the chair or nothing gets done. Votes: 3

John Dufresne

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Novels may have taken care of the emotional business for me, which has allowed music to be more emotional for me. Votes: 3

John Wesley Harding

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I have tried very hard as a novelist to say, 'Novels are about individuals and especially larger than life individuals.' Votes: 3

Bharati Mukherjee

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Novels do take charge of the writer, and the writer is basically a kind of sheepdog just trying to keep things on track. Votes: 3

John Gregory Dunne

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All great novels, all true novels, are bisexual. Votes: 2

Milan Kundera

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For me, novels coalesce into being, rather than arrive fully formed. Votes: 2

David Mitchell

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Sometimes people write novels and they just be so wordy and so self-absorbed. Votes: 2

Kanye West

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I do not use profanity in my novels. My characters all go to church. Votes: 2

Nicholas Sparks

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I think of myself as a serious professor who, during the weekend, writes novels. Votes: 2

Umberto Eco

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I think there is often a 'what if' proposition that gets me thinking about all my novels. Votes: 2

John Irving

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Love is more pleasant than marriage for the same reason that novels are more amusing than history. Votes: 2

Nicolas Chamfort

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I read novels but I also read the Bible. And study it, you know? And the more I learn, the more excited I get. Votes: 2

Johnny Cash

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I love the Swedish people for their detective novels, their archipelago, their sense of humor, their carbonated vodka, and most especially, for their wonderful hospitality. Votes: 2

Michael Levitt

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I fell in love with words in all languages, and I read everything I could find, particularly myths and legends and histories and archeology and any novels. Votes: 2

Kerry Greenwood

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My literature is much more the result of a paradox than that of an implacable logic, typical of police novels. The paradox is the tension that exists in my soul. Votes: 2

Paulo Coelho

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In the past, it was only in science fiction novels that you could read about ordinary people being able to go to space... But you laid the foundation for space tourism. Votes: 2

Nursultan Nazarbayev

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I like to give people novels I think they would like, on no particular occasion - just when we're in a bookstore together. I like to receive reference books on my birthday. Votes: 2

Daniel Handler

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Expand the definition of 'reading' to include non-fiction, humor, graphic novels, magazines, action adventure, and, yes, even websites. It's the pleasure of reading that counts; the focus will naturally broaden. A boy won't read shark books forever. Votes: 2

Jon Scieszka

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I grew up around books - my grandmother's house, where I lived as a small child, was full of books. My father was a history teacher, and he loved the Russian novels. There were always books around. Votes: 2

John Irving

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No matter how troubled a character's history, romance novels tell us, love can be built upon it, and happily-ever-after can result. What's more, the darker the past, the brighter the future - and the better the read. Votes: 2

Sarah MacLean

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You don't want to dwell on your enemies, you know. I basically feel so superior to my critics for the simple reason that they haven't done what I do. Most book reviewers haven't written 11 novels. Many of them haven't written one. Votes: 2

John Irving

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I will say that there is an inordinate amount of medicine in my novels, especially the first one. There are a lot of medical things that happen. A hip fracture, three different kinds of lung cancer, pneumonia, blood poisoning, and so on. Votes: 2

Khaled Hosseini

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I picked up 'The Hunger Games' thinking it was written at my regressed reading level. I've spent hours reading it, and I'm not even halfway through. Our bass player, whose name is also Nate, ended up reading all three novels and loved them. Votes: 2

Nate Ruess

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I have always loved and avidly read the novels of Jack London, Jules Verne and Ernest Hemingway. The characters depicted in their books, who are brave and resourceful people embarking on exciting adventures, definitely shaped my inner self and nourished my love for the outdoors. Votes: 2

Vladimir Putin

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I'm a feminist, but I think that romance has been taken away a bit for my generation. I think what people connect with in novels is this idea of an overpowering, encompassing love - and it being more important and special than anything and everything else. Votes: 2

Emma Watson

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Writing nonfiction is more like sculpture, a matter of shaping the research into the finished thing. Novels are like paintings, specifically watercolors. Every stroke you put down you have to go with. Of course you can rewrite, but the original strokes are still there in the texture of the thing. Votes: 2

Joan Didion

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I have to have three or four books going simultaneously. If I'm not impressed in the first 20 pages, I don't bother reading the rest, especially with novels. I'm not a book-club style reader. I'm not looking for life lessons or wanting people to think I'm smart because I'm reading a certain book. Votes: 2

Chris Abani

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Sometimes, a novel is like a train: the first chapter is a comfortable seat in an attractive carriage, and the narrative speeds up. But there are other sorts of trains, and other sorts of novels. They rush by in the dark; passengers framed in the lighted windows are smiling and enjoying themselves. Votes: 2

Jane Smiley

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In Ireland, novels and plays still have a strange force. The writing of fiction and the creation of theatrical images can affect life there more powerfully and stealthily than speeches, or even legislation. Imagined worlds can lodge deeply in the private sphere, dislodging much else, especially when the public sphere is fragile. Votes: 2

Colm Toibin

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People are much more complicated in real life, but my characters are as subtle and nuanced as I can make them. But if you say my characters are too black and white, you've missed the point. Villains are meant to be black-hearted in popular novels. If you say I have a grey-hearted villain, then I've failed. Votes: 2

Ken Follett

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All novels are experimental. Votes: 0

Anthony Burgess

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My novels are all ideas. Votes: 0

Michel Houellebecq

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I don't write romance novels. Votes: 0

Nicholas Sparks

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Fiction novels, that's my game. Votes: 0

David Benioff

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Writing novels is the most exciting Votes: 0

Sidney Sheldon

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Southern lawyers don't read novels much. Votes: 0

Harper Lee

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Perfect people make for boring novels. Votes: 0

hlbalcomb

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Writing novels is the most exciting. Votes: 0

Sidney Sheldon

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I write novels and other things. Votes: 0

Jack L. Chalker

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almost all novels are love stories. Votes: 0

George Sand

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All of my novels are democracies. Votes: 0

Amos Oz

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Nearly all novels are too long. Votes: 0

Rose Macaulay

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I don't very often read novels. Votes: 0

Sidney Poitier

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All novels are sequels; influence is bliss. Votes: 0

Michael Chabon

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Revisiting much-loved childhood novels is never easy. Votes: 0

Sarah Hall

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I spend about a year between novels Votes: 0

Anne Tyler

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Writing novels is an essentially amateur activity. Votes: 0

Jane Smiley

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Good novels are not written, they're rewritten! Votes: 0

Michael Crichton

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People respect nonfiction but they read novels. Votes: 0

E. O. Wilson

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I hated historical novels with fluttering cloaks. Votes: 0

Jeanette Winterson

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I won't read novels while writing novels. Votes: 0

Wally Lamb

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All great novels are great fairy tales. Votes: 0

Vladimir Nabokov

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Good travel books are novels at heart. Votes: 0

Jonathan Raban

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I think of my novels as entertainments. Votes: 0

Stephen L. Carter

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They say great themes make great novels Votes: 0

John O'Hara

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Wherever I am, I take books, not novels. Votes: 0

Caprice Bourret

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My first two novels were very black comedies. Votes: 0

Hilary Mantel

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I have assiduously avoided calling my books novels Votes: 0

Guillermo Cabrera Infante

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People compose poetry, novels, sitcoms - for love. Votes: 0

Helen Fisher

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However you disguise novels, they are always biographies. Votes: 0

William Golding

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I have assiduously avoided calling my books novels. Votes: 0

Guillermo Cabrera Infante

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Most people like a little sex in their novels. Votes: 0

John Sandford

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The Archer novels are about various kinds of brokenness. Votes: 0

Ross MacDonald

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You know, I read graphic novels but not encyclopedically. Votes: 0

Aisha Tyler

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Read history, works of truth, not novels and romances Votes: 0

Robert E. Lee

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She had always been an unashamed reader of novels ... Votes: 0

Barbara Pym

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Writing novels is a way of living alternative lives. Votes: 0

Melvyn Bragg

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It's with bad sentiments that one makes good novels. Votes: 0

Aldous Huxley

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I read mostly fiction, a lot of 19th-century novels. Votes: 0

Ken Follett

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In the first year, 1988, I wrote and sold 3 novels. Votes: 0

George Stephen

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I never even had the time to read novels. Votes: 0

George McGovern

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Good God! This man should be writing dime novels. Votes: 0

Josephus Daniels

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When I write, I get glimpses into future novels. Votes: 0

Patricia Briggs

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I am a professor who writes novels on Sundays Votes: 0

Umberto Eco

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National literature begins with fables and ends with novels. Votes: 0

Joseph Joubert

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Writing novels takes up about 100% of my available working time. Votes: 0

Charles Stross

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I read a lot of thrillers, especially American crime novels. Votes: 0

Kate Mosse

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I'm looking forward to writing more novels for young adults. Votes: 0

Candace Bushnell

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All novels are fantasies. Some are more honest about it. Votes: 0

Gene Wolfe

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Despite what novels implied, vampirism did not make stalking sexy. Votes: 0

Thomm Quackenbush

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Sometimes I ask myself if writing novels is even respectable. Votes: 0

Lorrie Moore

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Life resembles a novel more often than novels resemble life. Votes: 0

George Sand

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I have this prejudice that trilogies are long, three-volume novels. Votes: 0

William Gibson

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I don't really consider any of my novels 'crime' novels. Votes: 0

Megan Abbott

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The 'Barnaby' books were always intended to be graphic novels. Votes: 0

Janet Evanovich

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I get and read an enormous number of first novels. Votes: 0

Richard Russo

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My novels are certainly more exciting than my own life. Votes: 0

Tom Perrotta

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'Pastoralia' by George Saunders is one of my favorite novels. Votes: 0

Zooey Deschanel

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We can't behave like people in novels, though, can we? Votes: 0

Edith Wharton

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I read all of Ayn Rand's novels when I was 17. Votes: 0

Rand Paul

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It's true, reading too many novels makes you go blind. Votes: 0

David Mitchell

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I do quite extensive research for most of my novels. Votes: 0

Sjon

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I used to get criticized for putting food in novels. Votes: 0

Jim Harrison

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I usually tame my off-kilter sense of humor for novels. Votes: 0

Eden Robinson

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A lot of my YA novels are about family problems. Votes: 0

Susan Beth Pfeffer

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If you like my novels, I commend your good taste. Votes: 0

Rita Mae Brown

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If writers stuck to firsthand experience, novels would be pretty limited. Votes: 0

Stef Penney

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Aphorisms are bad for novels. They stick in the reader's teeth Votes: 0

Anatole Broyard

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Mostly what happens in the novels never happened in real life. Votes: 0

Anne Lamott

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A certain class of novels may with propriety be called fables. Votes: 0

Richard Whately

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A fortunate author can write maybe twelve novels in his lifetime. Votes: 0

Haruki Murakami

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Aphorisms are bad for novels. They stick in the reader's teeth. Votes: 0

Anatole Broyard

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I like to read dramatic novels and I absolutely love magazines. Votes: 0

Maud Welzen

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Transformation, liberation and celebration are the themes of all my novels. Votes: 0

Tom Robbins

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Structure is, for me, the most fun challenge about writing novels. Votes: 0

Heidi Julavits

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Great novels are always a little more intelligent than their authors. Votes: 0

Milan Kundera

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I like reading novels because it provides insight into human behavior. Votes: 0

Claire Danes

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All novels are about certain minorities: the individual is a minority. Votes: 0

Ralph Ellison

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the slight sense of degeneracy induced by reading novels before luncheon Votes: 0

Elizabeth Bowen

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In suspense novels even subplots about relationships have to have conflict. Votes: 0

Jeffery Deaver

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When novels deal in abstractions, they generally go off the rails. Votes: 0

Philipp Meyer

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I don't see novels ending with any real sense of closure. Votes: 0

Michael Ondaatje

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I have died and gone to the land of bad novels. Votes: 0

Gail Carriger

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I wrote my first five horror novels while I was teaching. Votes: 0

Sarah Pinborough

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The dead hand of research lies heavy on too many novels. Votes: 0

Nancy Hale

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Many modern novels have a beginning, a muddle and an end. Votes: 0

Philip Larkin

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I've started many novels, and they all ended on page seven. Votes: 0

Grace Paley

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Few of us write great novels; all of us live them. Votes: 0

Mignon McLaughlin

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For me, having it all is being paid to write novels. Votes: 0

Candace Bushnell

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A bank book makes good reading - better than some novels. Votes: 0

Sir Harry Lauder

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There's a sense in all my novels that nothing is certain. Votes: 0

William Boyd

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I read secular fiction, but also enjoy novels with a Christian worldview. Votes: 0

Randy Alcorn

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Will Shatner, Jonathan Frakes of Star Trek have already put novels out. Votes: 0

Bruce Boxleitner

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I write novels because there is something I don't understand in reality. Votes: 0

Manuel Puig

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I don't like novels that end happily. They depress me so much Votes: 0

Oscar Wilde

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I think sex is a very minor part of most romance novels. Votes: 0

Lauren Willig

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I read secular fiction, but also enjoy novels with a Christian worldview." Votes: 0

Randy Alcorn

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I don't write fantasy; I write historical novels about an imaginary place. Votes: 0

Raymond E. Feist

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Those novels with old-fashioned heroes and heroines in them -- are ruinous! Votes: 0

William Dean Howells

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By using novels, I show ordinary kids confronting and overcoming great odds. Votes: 0

Lurlene McDaniel

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Comic books and graphic novels are a great medium. It's incredibly underused. Votes: 0

Darren Aronofsky

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Whether early or late, the Parker novels are all superlative literary entertainments. Votes: 0

Terry Teachout

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Writing novels is where I'm most comfortable. It's a very intimate experience. Votes: 0

Matthew Nable

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I mostly read suspense novels, but I do occasionally read spiritual stuff. Votes: 0

Jai Uttal

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I was someone who really loved fantasy novels and science fiction novels. Votes: 0

Matthew Tobin Anderson

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I wrote about four novels before I wrote a word of journalism. Votes: 0

Francine Prose

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I know they are naught things, but I devour novels." (p. 57). Votes: 0

Shannon Hale

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The love of novels is the preference of sentiment to the senses. Votes: 0

Ralph Waldo Emerson

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I don't plot my novels - I move along with my characters. Votes: 0

Ellen Potter

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All my novels are rooted in their time and in their place. Votes: 0

Amos Oz

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My father has always been the heart of my Penn Cage novels, Votes: 0

Greg Iles

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I read *old* novels. The reason is simple. I prefer proper endings. Votes: 0

Diane Setterfield

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I don't read that many novels, I'm more of a nonfiction fan. Votes: 0

Cory Monteith

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Im a big fan of martial arts films, novels and radio programs. Votes: 0

Wong Kar-wai

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Writing novels is the hardest thing I've ever done, including digging irrigation ditches. Votes: 0

Thomas Harris

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To keep an active mind, I find that reading novels is really good. Votes: 0

Alison Pill

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The most cherished goal in physics, as in bad romance novels, is unification. Votes: 0

Lee Smolin

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There's a real emphasis on being witty in Scotland, even in crime novels. Votes: 0

Denise Mina

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Many novels and modern publications are corrupters of morals or distorters of truth. Votes: 0

Ezra Taft Benson

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Sometimes I - I try not to read too many fiction or novels. Votes: 0

John Mica

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I'm going to marry my novels and have little short stories for children. Votes: 0

Jack Kerouac

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I save the best of myself for novels, and I believe it shows Votes: 0

Anne Tyler

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I have written every one of my novels to convince somebody of something. Votes: 0

Manuel Puig

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Eighty percent of all novels are bought by women, or so I've heard. Votes: 0

Bonnie Jo Campbell

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I've read all of Sarah Waters's novels which have been translated into Korean. Votes: 0

Park Chan-wook

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Imaginatively Glasgow exists as a music hall song and a few bad novels. Votes: 0

Alasdair Gray

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All humanity is passion; without passion, religion, history, novels, art would be ineffectual. Votes: 0

Honore de Balzac

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Actually my first eight books were historical novels, but they were never published Votes: 0

Caroline B. Cooney

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Actually my first eight books were historical novels, but they were never published. Votes: 0

Caroline B. Cooney

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I save the best of myself for novels, and I believe it shows. Votes: 0

Anne Tyler

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To be able to analyze plays and novels is so relevant to acting. Votes: 0

Holliday Grainger

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The possibility of the impossible, dreams and illusions, are the subject of my novels. Votes: 0

Jose Saramago

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In Hollywood we acquire the finest novels in order to smell the leather bindings. Votes: 0

Ernst Lubitsch

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I think, above all, the characters in my novels feel universal to the readers. Votes: 0

Nicholas Sparks

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After 30 novels, release day is still a thrill. Its always a little bittersweet, too. Votes: 0

Luanne Rice

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After 30 novels, release day is still a thrill. It's always a little bittersweet, too. Votes: 0

Luanne Rice

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I have learned a great deal from novels. Some of it is even true. Votes: 0

Dean Koontz

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One of my favorite graphic novels of all time is Grant Morrison's 'Earth-2.' Votes: 0

Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa

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I'm a professional. So before I published any novels, I'd always been writing stories. Votes: 0

Jess Walter

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Vampire? Such a provocative word, wrapped in too many clichÃ©s and girly novels. Votes: 0

Matt Haig

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I actually think that short stories transfer to film much better than novels do. Votes: 0

Robin Hobb

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I wrote eight full-length adult novels in my twenties. None of them were published Votes: 0

Caroline B. Cooney

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A ruling passion gives to a shelf of novels the unity of a system. Votes: 0

Graham Greene

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Political novels are full of pitfalls, particularly for a novelist with strong political leanings. Votes: 0

Phil Klay

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the great novels have marched with the years. They are the contemporaries of time. Votes: 0

Ellen Glasgow

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This is why I read novels: so I can escape my own unrelenting monologue. Votes: 0

Carol Shields

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Poetry can only be made out of other poems; novels out of other novels. Votes: 0

Northrop Frye

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My novels are very much the same, as I think many people's novels are. Votes: 0

Ann Patchett

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I would be rejected if I submitted any of my novels as romance novels. Votes: 0

Nicholas Sparks

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In 25 years of writing novels, I've never had anything that felt like writer's block. Votes: 0

Richard Powers

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I've written 16 children's books and five unpublished novels. Some of the latter were breathtakingly bad. Votes: 0

Mark Haddon

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Spy novels are traditionally about lone wolves, but how many people actually live like that? Votes: 0

Alan Furst

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I write what I call 'novels of consolation' for people who are bright and sophisticated. Votes: 0

Alan Furst

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It always strikes me how almost unbelievably bad are the early versions of my novels. Votes: 0

Nicholas Mosley

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I've written 17 novels, and I've found out that fiction can't keep up with real life. Votes: 0

John Grisham

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I'm a very old-fashioned novelist. I write 19th-century novels, where a lot of rules apply. Votes: 0

John Irving

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I actually find novels that are determined to be funny at every turn quite oppressive. Votes: 0

Ian Mcewan

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I have written two medical novels. I have never studied medicine, never seen an operation. Votes: 0

Taylor Caldwell

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Thus, in pornographic novels, action has to be limited to the copulation of clichÃ©s. Votes: 0

Vladimir Nabokov

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Call me territorial or narcissistic, but I avoid novels about people who share my vocation. Votes: 0

Julia Glass

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Iris Murdoch did influence my early novels very much, and influence is never entirely good. Votes: 0

A. N. Wilson

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I have written two medical novels. I have never studied medicine, never seen an operation Votes: 0

Taylor Caldwell

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I love epistolary novels and became wildly excited when the form presented itself to me. Votes: 0

Maria Semple

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There are 2,000 young-adult novels published a year, and hardly any of them ever break out. Votes: 0

Catherine Hardwicke

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Of comic novels that have quaffed the elixir of 'classic': Zuleika Dobson by Max Beerbohm. Votes: 0

Cynthia Ozick

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Serial novels have an unexpected effect; they hook the writer as well as the reader. Votes: 0

Alexander McCall Smith

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I don't think you can write novels on the road. You need a certain stability. Votes: 0

Leonard Cohen

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There are often references to childhood, but they're rarely the focus of the [my] novels. Votes: 0

Paul Auster

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Maybe she should stop reading those damn romance novels. They were giving her crazy expectations. Votes: 0

Lexi Blake

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My novels come from within me; they are things I feel I want to do. Votes: 0

Roddy Doyle

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I feel that I am a scholar who only with the left hand writes novels. Votes: 0

Umberto Eco

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It took me six novels before I felt confident of my voice as a writer. Votes: 0

Andrea Hirata

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If I had a bookstore I would make all the mystery novels hard to find. Votes: 0

Demetri Martin

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It took me six novels before I felt confident of my voice as a writer, Votes: 0

Andrea Hirata

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No one goes to the toilet in novels. You'd think none of us had bladders. Votes: 0

Germaine Greer

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In the writing of novels, there is the problem of how to shape a narrative. Votes: 0

Gore Vidal

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Ayn Rand is a rhetorician who writes novels I have never been able to read. Votes: 0

Gore Vidal

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My novels are often about people who are in love or attracted to each other. Votes: 0

William Boyd

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The easy answer is that writing novels is a lot more fun than practicing law. Votes: 0

Jeffery Deaver

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I think reading the novels definitely was a good source for me to study from. Votes: 0

Laura Vandervoort

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I don't write tracts, I write novels. I'm not a preacher, I'm a fiction writer. Votes: 0

Ursula K. Le Guin

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I really love to make sweeping historical gestures that are like little illustrations of novels. Votes: 0

Kara Walker

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A lot of first novels are written long before they're actually put down on paper. Votes: 0

Roger Ebert

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I'm a novelist, that's how I make my livelihood, and I concentrate on the novels. Votes: 0

David Mitchell

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I feel like I don't understand time in novels, really. I bumble forward, is all. Votes: 0

Elizabeth McCracken

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My dad goes through war novels like I go through boxes of Cinnamon Toast Crunch. Votes: 0

Mike Birbiglia

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It's an article of faith that the novels I've loved will live inside me forever. Votes: 0

Pat Conroy

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Grand Central really didn't want me doing anything under my own name but the 'Kitty' novels. Votes: 0

Carrie Vaughn

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There are plenty of brilliant people who are too stressed out to read challenging literary novels. Votes: 0

John Burdett

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Almost without exception, my novels are rooted in Israel because that's the place I know well. Votes: 0

Amos Oz

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We trust to novels to train us in the practice of great indignations and great generositie. Votes: 0

Henry James

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If I really considered myself a writer, I wouldn't be writing screenplays. I'd be writing novels. Votes: 0

Quentin Tarantino

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Even with the sacred printing press, we got erotic novels 150 years before we got scientific journals. Votes: 0

Clay Shirky

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We trust to novels to train us in the practice of great indignations and great generosity. Votes: 0

Henry James

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Only in romance novels or in thrillers people live outside of a social and political context. Votes: 0

Isabel Allende

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Only in novels can we take another human being into our head and create something jointly. Votes: 0

Mohsin Hamid

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I believe novels can have secrets from their author, a notion I imagine would appall Nabokov. Votes: 0

Steve Erickson

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Magazines, books, novels, TV, internet, movies - all of those things is what creates our consciousness. Votes: 0

Jane Fonda

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Good novels are not written, they are rewritten. Great novels are diamonds mined from layered rewrites. Votes: 0

Piers Paul Read

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I myself love getting cookbooks and novels that some congenial person has already tried and liked. Votes: 0

Cheryl Mendelson

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I certainly think we're going to see more and more graphic novels and more illustrated novels. Votes: 0

Charlaine Harris

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All of my novels are seeded in real life events, and 'The Wreckage' is no different. Votes: 0

Michael Robotham

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In real life, coincidences happen all the time. In novels, they are leapt upon with fury. Votes: 0

Harlan Coben

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When I was growing up, I always read horror books, while my sister read romance novels. Votes: 0

Dorothy Allison

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I was convinced that the only thing I wanted to do ever - was write novels. Votes: 0

J. K. Rowling

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I read graphic novels, here and there, but I'm not a comic book guy, as much. Votes: 0

Zachary Levi

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I prefer all but the very worst travel books, to all but the very best novels. Votes: 0

Evelyn Waugh

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As far as I am concerned, I write novels, and other people can do the labelling. Votes: 0

Peter Temple

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I've ended up feeling fonder of 'The Paying Guests' than of any of my other novels. Votes: 0

Sarah Waters

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Characters are the key to a good book. It took me several novels to comprehend that. Votes: 0

Michael Morpurgo

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I'm a cartoonist. I write and draw comic books and graphic novels. I'm also a coder. Votes: 0

Gene Luen Yang

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All my novels are about the ambiguities that lie beneath the sharp edges of the law. Votes: 0

Scott Turow

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When I wrote The Onion Field, I realized that my first two novels were just practice. Votes: 0

Joseph Wambaugh

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Trollope wrote so many novels and other works that they tend to crowd each other out. Votes: 0

Jane Smiley

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I am almost six-novels-old. It took me until the third novel to call myself a writer. Votes: 0

Manju Kapur

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Anyone who is going to be a writer knows enough at fifteen to write several novels. Votes: 0

May Sarton

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I think graphic novels are closer to prose than film, which is a really different form. Votes: 0

Denise Mina

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When someone asks me to list the 10 best novels ever written, I always refuse to answer. Votes: 0

Henning Mankell

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I did not have a chance to write novels until my youngest child started school fulltime. Votes: 0

Anne McCaffrey

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I did not have a chance to write novels until my youngest child started school fulltime Votes: 0

Anne McCaffrey

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I could read at a very early age and I loved stories, losing myself in stories, novels. Votes: 0

Heather Donahue

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On that other novels followed: but I still wrote fairy tales and dreamy poems of another world." Votes: 0

Laurence Housman

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What do you do when Mom leaves you alone like this? (Kat) I write romance novels. (Acheron) Votes: 0

Sherrilyn Kenyon

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Approach your lives as if they were novels, with their own heroes, villains, red herrings, and triumphs Votes: 0

Mary Higgins Clark

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If you have no conflict, you have no story. That's number one. That's a rule of novels. Votes: 0

Nicholas Sparks

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Ladies know what to guard against, because they read novels that tell them of these tricksâ¦ Votes: 0

Thomas Hardy

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My novels are about the European reality, not about chases. You want chases, get somebody else's books. Votes: 0

Alan Furst

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One of my biggest goals, especially with writing YA novels, is just to have people enjoy reading. Votes: 0

Lauren Conrad

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The idea that people in novels should be more sympathetic than people in life simply baffles me. Votes: 0

Andrew O'Hagan

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I was a political journalist; I came to writing novels through an interest in politics and power. Votes: 0

Robert Harris

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Once I started writing novels, I understood how hard it was to write really good short stories. Votes: 0

Elizabeth McCracken

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I keep thinking I'll enjoy suspense novels, and sometimes I do. I've read about 20 Dick Francis novels. Votes: 0

Nicholson Baker

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I give novels as gifts, and there is nothing I like to receive more as a gift. Votes: 0

Khaled Hosseini

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In the end I write the novels I need to write when I need to write them. Votes: 0

Steve Erickson

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Charles Dickens left us fifteen novels, and in an ideal world, everyone would read all of them. Votes: 0

Robert Gottlieb

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There are some short essays that are very grave, and most contemporary novels are lighter than air. Votes: 0

Fran Lebowitz

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I believe that I have now experienced the lifetime maximum exposure to bottom spanking in fantasy novels. Votes: 0

James Nicoll

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I think most novelists I know, certainly including me, feel the novels choose them rather than vice-versa. Votes: 0

Steve Erickson

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I think the short story is a very underrated art form. We know that novels deserve respect. Votes: 0

Neil Gaiman

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I've written some standalone novels, but a book series allows fans in. There's much more intense involvement. Votes: 0

George R. R. Martin

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I love reading about the supernatural, and time-slip novels, and the mistress of both is Barbara Erskine. Votes: 0

Alison Weir

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Reading was like a drug, a dope. The novels created moods in which I lived for days. Votes: 0

Richard Wright

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I think one of the good things about writing novels is that you always start from scratch. Votes: 0

Maria Semple

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The best part of the fiction in many novels is the notice that the characters are imaginary. Votes: 0

Franklin P. Adams

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I think in general, novels by men tend to be taken more seriously than novels by women. Votes: 0

Curtis Sittenfeld

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Sometimes I don't know whether I'm real or whether I'm a character in one of my novels. Votes: 0

F. Scott Fitzgerald

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I could get a better education interviewing John Steinbeck than talking to an English professor about novels. Votes: 0

William Safire

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I don't think you can tell the objective truth about a person. That's why people write novels. Votes: 0

A. N. Wilson

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A lot of period pieces we see are adaptations of novels - we always know the story. Votes: 0

Joanne Froggatt

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The best part of the fiction in many novels is the notice that the characters are purely imaginary. Votes: 0

Franklin P. Adams

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My reading preferences are kind of all over the board - I read nonfiction, I read graphic novels... Votes: 0

Dav Pilkey

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I have come to understand something about novels," Tessa said. "And what is that?" "They are not true. Votes: 0

Cassandra Clare

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Far more women read fiction than men, and because of this, novels have become marginalised as serious texts. Votes: 0

Siri Hustvedt

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I love reading. I'm very much into history, novels, biographies and I have a wide range of thrillers. Votes: 0

Bruno Tonioli

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I think I've finally learned to stop worrying about how big the gaps are between my novels' publication. Votes: 0

Justine Larbalestier

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The only two kinds of books could earn an American writer a living are cookbooks and detective novels. Votes: 0

Rex Stout

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I grew up on genre - on Westerns, spy thrillers, sci-fi, fantasy novels, horror novels. Especially horror novels. Votes: 0

Benjamin Percy

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People in my novels always have terrible problems. If they are not terrible, I make them more terrible. Votes: 0

Barbara Kingsolver

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I had been attempting novels since I was 14 but always ran out of steam. High hopes, poor craftsmanship. Votes: 0

Michel Faber

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If writing novels is like planting a forest, then writing short stories is more like planting a garden. Votes: 0

Haruki Murakami

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One should not be too severe on English novels; they are the only relaxation of the intellectually unemployed. Votes: 0

Oscar Wilde

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I take a lot from everywhere. I take from music, architecture, novels, and plays. Anywhere that hits you. Votes: 0

Alex Winter

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Getting 10,000 listeners for a free podcast novel is a lot easier than selling 10,000 hardcover novels at $25 a pop. Votes: 0

Jeremy Robinson

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Modesty and conscientiousness receive their reward only in novels. In life they are exploited and then shoved aside. Votes: 0

Erich Maria Remarque

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I'm very interested in writing - it just takes so much discipline, whether it's short stories or novels. Votes: 0

Conor Oberst

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I'm my own "ideal reader" in the sense that I write novels that I would want to read. Votes: 0

Steve Erickson

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She liked Victorian novels. They were the only kind of novel you could read while eating an apple. Votes: 0

Stella Gibbons

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There are not many English novels which deserve to be called great: Parade's End is one of them. Votes: 0

W. H. Auden

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I'm a novelist at heart. How's that? And that's how I make my living, is I write novels. Votes: 0

Nicholas Sparks

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We are not quite novels. We are not quite short stories. In the end, we are collected works Votes: 0

Gabrielle Zevin

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Yes, I was good at reading people. I studied them so I could put them in my novels. Votes: 0

Jennifer Echols

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In most conventional novels, God is not allowed to be nuts. Nor are nuts allowed to be God. Votes: 0

John Thomas Sladek

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If the masses are not thrown a few novels , they may react by throwing up a few barricades. Votes: 0

Terry Eagleton

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The Hollywood movies are more like novels, and the kinds of films I make are more like poems. Votes: 0

Stan Brakhage

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The thing about the 'Melrose' novels is that I have to feel they're impossible when I set out. Votes: 0

Edward St Aubyn

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Writers of novels live in a strange world where what's made up is as important as what's real. Votes: 0

Sara Sheridan

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If I write novels in a country in which most citizens are illiterate, who then is my community? Votes: 0

Chinua Achebe

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I've written only two novels, but they're both long ones, and they each took a decade to write. Votes: 0

Donna Tartt

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To ask a novelist to talk about his novels is like asking somebody to cook about their dancing. Votes: 0

Jim Crace

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Do your bit to save humanity from lapsing back into barbarity by reading all the novels you can. Votes: 0

Richard Hughes

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I really enjoy writing novels. Its like the ocean. You can just build a boat and take off. Votes: 0

Denis Johnson

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I've written six novels and four pieces of nonfiction, so I don't really have a genre these days. Votes: 0

Anne Lamott

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If everybody lived as I do, surely the writing of romance novels would never have come into being. Votes: 0

Albert Einstein

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I project myself so deeply into the characters in novels that I'm not thinking about my own life. Votes: 0

Paul Auster

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The trouble began with Forster. After him it was considered ungentlemanly to write more than five or six novels. Votes: 0

Anthony Burgess

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I'd like to think that my films are personal enough to exist without hearkening back to their respective novels. Votes: 0

Frank Darabont

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More than 3,500 hardcover novels are published each year. Even the most avid reader buys fewer than one a week. Votes: 0

M.J. Rose

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I'm a hopeful romantic who adores novels with happy endings, because there are enough sad endings in real life. Votes: 0

Tammara Webber

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I wonder if novels work for women because they give us a safe place to talk about our ish. Votes: 0

Jennifer Weiner

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Middlemarch, the magnificent book which with all its imperfections is one of the few English novels for grown-up people. Votes: 0

Virginia Woolf

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When you read a novel, you know what to expect because you've been reading novels for a long time. Votes: 0

Alejandro Zambra

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I developed the habit of writing novels behind a closed door, or at my uncle's, on the dining table. Votes: 0

Patrick White

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I'd harbored hopes that the intelligence that once inhabited novels or films would ingest rock. I was, perhaps, wrong. Votes: 0

Lou Reed

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Not to disparage anything, but most vampire stories tend to be romance novels that are 'Twilight'-ish with metrosexual guys. Votes: 0

Mark Pellegrino

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I think you can tell when you meet someone whether they read novels. There's some hollowness if they don't. Votes: 0

Philip Hensher

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Personally, I'm a big reader, and I've never wanted any of my favorite novels to be made into movies. Votes: 0

Stephen Moyer

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Few novels or plays could exist without at least one troublemaker in the group, and perhaps life couldn't either. Votes: 0

Mignon McLaughlin

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I don't read novels, but my semiotics study influenced everything about the way I read and edit and write. Votes: 0

Ira Glass

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I always write my novels with music (I don't listened to the music seriously.) Music seems to encourage me. Votes: 0

Haruki Murakami

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The best point of my novels, I think, is their humor. I want to keep many my works humorous. Votes: 0

Haruki Murakami

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I'm not trying to write cinematic novels, but I have been told several times that my style is cinematic. Votes: 0

Nicholas Royle

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My novels are high concept. I guess big ideas interest me more than, say, the minutiae of domestic life. Votes: 0

Scarlett Thomas

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I was writing novels in high school and apprenticed myself in a way both to Faulkner and to Hemingway. Votes: 0

Joyce Carol Oates

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I try to keep all my novels in print. Sometimes publishers don't agree with me as to their worth. Votes: 0

Ed McBain

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I write the kinds of novels I like to read, where the setting is rendered with love and care. Votes: 0

Elizabeth George

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When it comes to creating graphic novels I always deliberately work on something completely different to the previous one. Votes: 0

Bryan Talbot

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People without hope not only don't write novels, but what is more to the point, they don't read them. Votes: 0

Flannery O'Connor

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I used the pen name because I knew I wanted to write better novels under my own name someday, Votes: 0

Nelson DeMille

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I remember a table in BarchesterTowers that had more character than the combined heroes of three recent novels I've read. Votes: 0

Anatole Broyard

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We love fantasy novels in which the characters think that they're peasants but turn out to be princes and kings. Votes: 0

Matthew Tobin Anderson

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It is my huge pleasure that my novels are translated into languages that are read among small numbers of people. Votes: 0

Haruki Murakami

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For the novels I wrote before selling anything, I didn't outline much. I had a vague idea of the story. Votes: 0

George Stephen

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I grew up reading the classic novels of Cold War espionage, and I studied Russian history and Soviet foreign policy. Votes: 0

Daniel Silva

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I feel like it's hard to get into historical novels where you know what the story is far too well. Votes: 0

Matthew Tobin Anderson

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I'm writing novels because I found something I love because I tried it. Don't be afraid to shake it up. Votes: 0

Adriana Trigiani

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Most of humanity gets by without reading novels or poetry, and no one would deny the richness of their thoughts. Votes: 0

Ian Mcewan

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At least half the mystery novels published violate the law that the solution, once revealed, must seem to be inevitable. Votes: 0

Raymond Chandler

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Critics are not creators. They rarely write great novels, invent new technologies, or come up with a great business idea. Votes: 0

Jacqueline Leo

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She said writting novels was like childbirth: if you truly remembered how awful it got, you'd never do it again. Votes: 0

Sarah Dessen

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specialize in small cast/single reader long fiction so I only compete against other podcasts of novels in that form. Votes: 0

Nathan Lowell

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The writer of stories or of novels settles on men and imitates them; he exhausts the possibilities of his characters. Votes: 0

Salvatore Quasimodo

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In all my novels, I deal with the many problems and prejudices which exist for Black people in Britain today. Votes: 0

Buchi Emecheta

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I'm writing a movie about Mozart going to New York in the '60s. I've been reading so many novels." Votes: 0

John Cale

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Primarily I am a passionately religious man, and my novels must be written from the depth of my religious experience. Votes: 0

D. H. Lawrence

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My Italian-American heritage, of which I'm very proud and with which I identify strongly, surfaces in several of my novels. Votes: 0

Wally Lamb

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I like the idea of making big budget films with a heart. I like graphic novels more than comic books. Votes: 0

Matthew Vaughn

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I received so many positive comments about the quotes that I decided to continue to use them in my novels. Votes: 0

Julie Klassen

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The reason Saul Bellow doesn't talk to me anymore is because he knows his new novels are not worth reading. Votes: 0

Leslie Fiedler

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I don't generally derive my stories from novels. I try to turn into film things I have felt or experienced. Votes: 0

Abbas Kiarostami

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Of course the 19th century remained in blissful ignorance of post-modern irony, and the dime novels were made without end. Votes: 0

Clive Sinclair

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I'm writing a movie about Mozart going to New York in the '60s. I've been reading so many novels. Votes: 0

John Cale

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As a teenager, I wanted to write novels. By college, it was theater, plays, and then, shortly, it was film. Votes: 0

Richard Linklater

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But I think, and hope, that the novels can be understood and enjoyed as science fiction, on their own terms. Votes: 0

Dan Simmons

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What I try to do with any of my stories, any of my novels, is make them feel very original. Votes: 0

Nicholas Sparks

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Sex annihilates identity, and the space given to sex in contemporary novels is an avowal of the absence of character. Votes: 0

Mary McCarthy

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I don't read books. I like to read newspapers and magazines, but I've never learnt to enjoy books or novels. Votes: 0

Kid Rock

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If a writer writes poems and short stories and novels, but nobody ever reads them, is she really a writer? Votes: 0

Jennifer Weiner

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I try to write about things, places, events, and phenomena I know about personally. That helps make the novels more genuine. Votes: 0

Lincoln Child

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Romance novels satisfy a very specific fantasy of romantic love that seems to be a powerful part of the female psyche. Votes: 0

Melissa Pritchard

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Writing is my number one passion. I've written two novels. I've written a screenplay. I also write short stories and poetry. Votes: 0

Evangeline Lilly

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We only have one story. All novels, all poetry are built on the never-ending contest in ourselves of good and evil. Votes: 0

John Steinbeck

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I'd probably still be a financial journalist now if it weren't for writing novels. Mmm. Fun! I'm much happier writing novels! Votes: 0

Sophie Kinsella

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I write novels, mostly historical ones, and I try hard to keep them accurate as to historical facts, milieu and flavor. Votes: 0

Gary Jennings

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The correlations between real life experience and the storylines in novels are never as direct or simple as they might seem. Votes: 0

Ayana Mathis

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I think literature has lost it's power. Great novels continue to be written, but they are no longer changing the world. Votes: 0

Don DeLillo

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I've tried very hard and I've never found any resemblance between the people I know and the people in my novels. Votes: 0

Francoise Sagan

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My novels and poems are meant to be read aloud. That's why jazz musicians have been able to adapt my stuff. Votes: 0

Ishmael Reed

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I seem always to have two or three novels going at once. It takes me a long time to finish one. Votes: 0

Michael Helm

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I think reading has got so many more enemies now that graphic novels have kind of flipped over to that side. Votes: 0

Gene Luen Yang

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Well, I think in my first two novels, both the characters are pretty neurotic, which I would say that I am. Votes: 0

Curtis Sittenfeld

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I do love the young adult novels as a form and genre, because it has a purity of intention and heart. Votes: 0

Ira Sachs

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I consciously try to end my novels at a point where I won't have to wonder about my characters ever again. Votes: 0

Anne Tyler

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I majored in English in college, so I read the classic dystopian novels like '1984' and 'Brave New World.' Votes: 0

Lois Lowry

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The beauty of my work is that my sets cost nothing. That's what I love about being a writer of novels. Votes: 0

Markus Zusak

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I love getting cookbooks - people will give them to me, and I read them like novels and file everything away. Votes: 0

Gwyneth Paltrow

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All those words of praise they use for novels - spare, economical. Why should I shell out Â£17 for economical? Votes: 0

Howard Jacobson

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Not merely one of the finest fantasy novels of recent years, but one of the finest ever. Should not be missed Votes: 0

Brian Stableford

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One of the things that novels have tended not to concentrate on over the centuries is the fact that people read books. Votes: 0

Jonathan Lethem

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Im a geek - I read fantasy novels, I play World of Warcraft, Im a massive gamer, I have Star Trek outfits. Votes: 0

Robert Kazinsky

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I'm not embarrassed about the novels I wrote when I was younger, but I couldn't write them today because of my religion. Votes: 0

Louise Mensch

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I try to stick with what moves me or teaches me about myself, same thing I hope the novels do for others. Votes: 0

Wally Lamb

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Hollywood called just as I crested thirty. My novels did not and still do not interest them, but my writing ability did. Votes: 0

Rita Mae Brown

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Poetry, plays, novels, music, they are the cry of the human spirit trying to understand itself and make sense of our world. Votes: 0

Laura Elliott

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Even though I got a late start, first publishing an essay when I was 50 years old, I've since written eight suspense novels. Votes: 0

Hallie Ephron

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I have to read comic books all first, because now when you get into graphic novels, they are definitely in deep graphic. Votes: 0

Virginia Madsen

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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. Votes: 0

George R. R. Martin

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As an adolescent I wrote comic books, because I read lots of them, and fantasy novels set in Malaysia and Central Africa. Votes: 0

Umberto Eco

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'Oscar Wao' for example cohered in a period of terrible distress. All the novels that I wanted to write were not happening. Votes: 0

Junot Diaz

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I envy those writers who outline their novels, who know where they're going. But I find writing is a process of discovery. Votes: 0

Jay McInerney

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I describe my works as books, but my publishers in Spain, in the United States, and elsewhere insist on calling them novels Votes: 0

Guillermo Cabrera Infante

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I don't write novels about expeditions to the planet Mars because I haven't been there and I don't know anything about it. Votes: 0

Amos Oz

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When you are young, hone your craft and write shorter pieces instead of novels, because it's really hard to finish a novel. Votes: 0

Laini Taylor

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Graphic novels are such a visually creative world - it's really interesting what they can do in one sketch. Now I'm hooked. Votes: 0

Michelle MacLaren

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Because I had grown up with Jane Austen novels and period dramas, I was very familiar with that period and that world. Votes: 0

Gugu Mbatha-Raw

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Poetry, plays, novels, music, they are the cry of the human spirit trying to understand itself and make sense of our world. Votes: 0

L.M. Elliott

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I had a long period of writing what I think of as 'save the world' novels. 'Fledgling' was a chance to play. Votes: 0

Octavia E. Butler

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In fact, with each of my novels I have been surprised by something that happens that I had not thought of beforehand. Votes: 0

Julie Klassen

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The only form of fiction in which real characters do not seem out of place is history. In novels they are detestable. Votes: 0

Oscar Wilde

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I started realising that the themes running through all of my novels were really haunting and obsessing me about my own life. Votes: 0

Dani Shapiro

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I wonder if we are all wrong about each other, if we are just composing unwritten novels about the people we meet? Votes: 0

Rebecca West

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Like a lot of what happens in novels, inspiration is a sort of spontaneous combustion--the oily rags of the head and heart. Votes: 0

Stanley Elkin

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In most novels, the landscape, or the place, in which the story takes part is simply a backdrop to the human action. Votes: 0

Paul Kingsnorth

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Graham Greene's work must be included in any survey of top-rank spy novels, and 'Our Man in Havana' may be his best. Votes: 0

Alan Furst

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I don't like the word rock opera, but I'm trying to write on that level that's reserved for plays still, or novels. Votes: 0

Lou Reed

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I never plot out my novels in terms of the tone of the book. Hopefully, once a story is begun it reveals itself Votes: 0

Alice Hoffman

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I don't write fantasy, I write reality. Also, my novels have roots to Greek tragedies and as such, there has to be tragedy. Votes: 0

Nicholas Sparks

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I think that novels are one of the best means that we have to communicate both with the past and with the future. Votes: 0

Emily Barton

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I was an English major in university and that got me into novels, but I read a lot of books as a kid. Votes: 0

Dan Mangan

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I've never taken any classes or had formal training in writing novels. At its most basic, I learned how to structure a novel. Votes: 0

Dennis Green

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I am pretty interested in hybrid forms. I love graphic novels and I think there should be more graphic poems in the world. Votes: 0

Matthea Harvey

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I'm a geek - I read fantasy novels, I play 'World of Warcraft,' I'm a massive gamer, I have 'Star Trek' outfits. Votes: 0

Robert Kazinsky

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She was the amoureuse of all the novels, the heroine of all the plays, the vague "she" of all the poetry books. Votes: 0

Gustave Flaubert

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I wish people would think of me as a musician who writes novels, instead of a novelist who writes music on the side. Votes: 0

Anthony Burgess

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I love writing novels, even if only a few thousand people read them. Here's my soul; I hope it appeals to your soul. Votes: 0

Mark O'Donnell

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I once owned a collection of 77 novels that won the Pulitzer. The only good novel of the bunch was The Grapes of Wrath. Votes: 0

Larry McMurtry

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I have been a film buff all my life and believe that the finest cinema is fully the equal of the best novels. Votes: 0

Salman Rushdie

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I think the internet is a great marketing tool--but marketing is not my job. I'm a writer. My job is to write novels. Votes: 0

Bentley Little

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At a certain point my novels set. They set just as hard as that jam jar. And then I know they are finished. Votes: 0

Ivy Compton-Burnett

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We are not telling Tudor history; we are creating ' Wolf Hall ' from novels, which are already a rereading of Tudor history. Votes: 0

Damian Lewis

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Usually people who do bad things make good writers.I did a lot of bad things, which is why my novels are interesting. Votes: 0

Jakucho Setouchi

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In ordinary detective novels you never see the consequences of what happens in a story in the next book. That you do in mine. Votes: 0

Steig Larsson

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I am honored to have had two Hallmark Hall of Fame Productions made from my novels - Silver Bells and Follow the Stars Home. Votes: 0

Luanne Rice

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I think the martial arts tradition has a big influence on our generation - we all read these novels when we were very young. Votes: 0

Wong Kar-wai

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In ordinary detective novels you never see the consequences of what happens in a story in the next book. That you do in mine. Votes: 0

Stieg Larsson

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I suppose I have written novels to find out what I thought about something and poems to find out what I felt about something. Votes: 0

May Sarton

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The last time I was in Spain I got through six Jeffrey Archer novels. I must remember to take enough toilet paper next time. Votes: 0

Bob Monkhouse

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My dream was to eventually make movies. To be part of the fairy tales, stories and novels I loved reading so much growing up. Votes: 0

Irena A. Hoffman

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I never plan my novels because if I know what is going to happen, it bores me rigid. I let the story tell itself. Votes: 0

James Herbert

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I've read enough novels to know just how much time & energy it takes to fall in love and I just don't have the time Votes: 0

Alexandra Kollontai

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A lot of novels use crime as a stepping stone to talk about greater issues. So I just think of myself as a writer. Votes: 0

Karin Slaughter

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I do novels a bit backward. I look for a situation, a milieu first, and then I wait to see who walks into it. Votes: 0

Tom Wolfe

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I also read modern novels - I have just had to read 60 as I am one of the judges for the Orange Fiction Prize. Votes: 0

Kate Adie

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I look on my life as raw material for my novels: that's just the way I am, and it frees me from any inhibitions. Votes: 0

Imre KertÃ©sz

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I can write three novels in the time it takes to write one novella. I'm probably not going to go with that form again. Votes: 0

Nathan Lowell

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Most novels I come across have all the excitement of a long trip on a bus with a sensitive glee club. Yammer and chat. Votes: 0

Barry Hannah

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To Kill A Mockingbird' is one of my favourite novels, my mum brought me up reading it, and it never fails to move me. Votes: 0

Jessica Marais

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To Kill A Mockingbird is one of my favourite novels, my mum brought me up reading it, and it never fails to move me. Votes: 0

Jessica Marais

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The best crime novels are not about how a detective works on a case; they are about how a case works on a detective. Votes: 0

Michael Connelly

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I don't know if memoirs can produce literary work of the first order. But I do know that novels are doing it only rarely. Votes: 0

Vivian Gornick

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I hope people will like my novels after I'm dead. And I hope my children think about me in good ways, by and large. Votes: 0

Clyde Edgerton

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Well, writing was what I wanted to do, it was always what I wanted to do. I had novels to write so I wrote them. Votes: 0

Octavia Butler

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I give people 'If You Came Softly' when they demand proof that novels for teens can be as good as the best novels for adults. Votes: 0

Justine Larbalestier

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It's a luxury to be able to tell a long form story. I love novels, and I love to have a long relationship with characters. Votes: 0

Jane Campion

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I think of novels as houses. You live in them over the course of a long period, both as a reader and as a writer. Votes: 0

Nicole Krauss

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There're no novels that I like to read so I write my own novels, and then I read them again, and it's the best thing. Votes: 0

Willow Smith

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I wasn't that into crime novels at all, but a friend introduced me to the work of Jim Thompson - I loved all his books. Votes: 0

Jo Nesbo

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I give people If You Came Softly when they demand proof that novels for teens can be as good as the best novels for adults. Votes: 0

Justine Larbalestier

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I donât like to make strong statements. I want to write strong novels â¦ I keep my deep radical things for my novels. Votes: 0

Orhan Pamuk

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I feel like humor is a part of life. I don't think it comes through as much in the novels as it does in my head. Votes: 0

Stephenie Meyer

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To have her meals, and her daily walk, and her fill of novels, and to be left alone, was all that she asked of the gods. Votes: 0

Anthony Trollope

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This is what I love about novels - both reading them and writing them. They jump into the abyss to be with you where you are. Votes: 0

John Green

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I'm a big fan of a lot of graphic novels - 'Fables,' 'Y: The Last Man' and 'The Walking Dead,' which I like a lot more. Votes: 0

Cobie Smulders

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I had a story-telling mother; she's written novels and short stories. So I feel like maybe I'm staying alive by telling tales.

Ayshay

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I really believe that readers are smart and sophisticated enough to realize that the author is not the narrator of his novels.

Bret Easton Ellis

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With novels, you're sitting at a desk, alone, going slightly crazy, for anywhere from six months to a year with zero feedback.

Duane Swierczynski

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For all my longer works (i.e. the novels) I write chapter outlines so I can have the pleasure of departing from them later on.

Garth Nix

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From the beginning. I was a poem-writing child. I wrote little novels in my composition book when I was eight, nine years old.

Joan Larkin

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I think that novels that leave out technology misrepresent life as badly as Victorians misrepresented life by leaving out sex.

Kurt Vonnegut

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How different from the cosy world of RÃ¼ya's detective novels, where authors never vexed a hero with more signs than he needed.

Orhan Pamuk

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Readers of novels are a strange folk, upon whose probable or even possible tastes no wise book-maker would ever venture to bet.

E. V. Lucas

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I have learned as much about writing about my people by listening to blues and jazz and spirituals as I have by reading novels.

Ernest Gaines

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I can't think of any one film that improved on a good novel, but I can think of many good films that came from very bad novels.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez

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[My novels] introduce levels of intelligence ... moral doubt [and] self-doubt, which may not pertain [to real-world espionage].

John le Carre

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Small pictures since the Renaissance are like novels; large pictures are like dramas in which one participates in a direct way.

Mark Rothko

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... there is ... a big aspect of play in writing novels, and making the story more and more elaborate is just more and more fun.

Gish Jen

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Good novels are produced by people who voluntarily isolate themselves and go deep, and report from the depths on what they find.

Jonathan Franzen

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Novels, since the birth of the genre, have been full of rejected, seduced, and abandoned maidens, whose proper fate is to die...

Margaret Drabble

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Diana felt she was beginning to understand why, in all those novels she read, the headiest loves were the loves that couldn't be.

Anna Godbersen

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Novels may teach us as wholesome a moral as the pulpit. There are "sermons in stones," in healthy books, and "good in everything.

Charles Caleb Colton

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To the composition of novels and romances, nothing is necessary but paper, pens, and ink, with the manual capacity of using them.

Henry Fielding

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I'm no lyrical stylist; you wouldn't pick me for a perfect sentence, and I certainly wouldn't describe my novels as intellectual.

Joanna Trollope

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With the crime novels, its delightful to have protagonists I can revisit in book after book. Its like having a fictitious family.

John Banville

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I hate the word juicy in describing anything: lips, plots, oranges. But especially novels. It feels - icky. Reminds me of saliva.

Lauren Grodstein

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We do seem, as a culture, to fetishize the "sweep." But I know there's room for "big" short, fierce novels, and "big" solid ones.

Meg Wolitzer

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I think novels just really show us the deepest parts of people's hearts, and you cannot walk away anymore and say, "I don't know."

Edwidge Danticat

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When you're my age and you see a story, you better go for it pretty quickly. I'd just like to get a few more novels under my belt.

John le Carre

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In writing, I'm totally anti-plans of any kind. All my attempts to plan and plot novels have come to grief, and in expensive ways.

Peter Temple

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Novels are sweets. All people with healthy literary appetites love them-almost all women; a vast number of clever, hardheaded men.

William Makepeace Thackeray

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Three of my novels and a good number of my short stories are told from the point of view of men. I was brought up in a house of women.

Colm Toibin

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Writing novels reminds me of being an awkward 15-year-old typing on a Commodore 64 in his bedroom, trying to be the next Stephen King.

Duane Swierczynski

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I must love big novels, because that's what I've written. It takes a while before you begin to breathe the air the characters breathe.

Norman Rush

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After something crystallizes, I can write ferociously and write novels in six months, which in the past would have taken me two years.

Paul Auster

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Toronto may be the only city where novels are integral to high art, the alternative scene and mainstream culture all at the same time.

Stephen Marche

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I never see a novel as a film while I'm writing it. Mostly because novels and films are so different, and I'm such an internal novelist

Alice Hoffman

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I enjoy going back and forth between plays and novels. It`s like having a wife and a mistress. Books are the wife; plays, the mistress.

Stephen King

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She found herself longing for home-not just for the hotel but for New York and all the real novels that she could lose herself in there.

Anna Godbersen

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Romance is very pretty in novels, but the romance of a life is always a melancholy matter. They are most happy who have no story to tell.

Anthony Trollope

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If I had the luxury of working as a full time writer, I think you would see novels appearing on a much more regular, and frequent, basis.

John Scott

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I have a backlog of novels which I would love to be working on and would be working on if I were not obliged to hold down a full time job.

John Scott

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Historical novels, in particular, allow us to relive the past without the neatness of history, and with all the complexity of the present.

Laila Lalami

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Without explaining why, and, most of all, without naming other authors or books, I can only say my novels are influenced by love and death.

Alice McDermott

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If I wanted to be in movies, I'd have gone into scriptwriting: the fact that I write novels should be a big hint about what I prefer to do!

Charles Stross

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I wrote four novels, but then I realized that the world didn't need me to be a novelist, but the world could use me as a nonfiction writer.

David Quammen

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Most publishers seem very reluctant to publish short story collections at all; they bring them out in paperback, often disguised as novels.

John Thomas Sladek

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I'm hoping to develop a lot of graphic novels and television shows and films and animation. I've got my hands in a lot of different things!

Michael B. Jordan

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Novels have become equally important to me as films. I consider myself a storyteller and passionately engaged in both of those disciplines.

Rebecca Miller

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We have different kinds of intimacy with many, many people. I'm disappointed by well-written novels that only deal with two or three people.

Ann Patchett

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I have read all my novels that were translated into English. Reading my novels is enjoyable because I forget almost all the content in them.

Haruki Murakami

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They say great themes make great novels. but what these young writers don't understand is that there is no greater theme than men and women.

John O'Hara

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I prefer short stories, but publishers would, of course, rather that writers produce novels, since novels are still more commercially viable.

Charles Baxter

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I have time to write 1-2 novels per year, and get roughly novel-sized ideas every month. I have to perform triage on my own writing impulses.

Charles Stross

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Wonderful thing about novels is that sometimes we read a novel and we know the person in the novel more than we know people in our own lives.

Edwidge Danticat

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Read. Read. Read. Read. Read great books. Read poetry, history, biography. Read the novels that have stood the test of time. And read closely.

David McCullough

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I don't like to read novels where the novelist tells me what to think about the situation and the characters. I prefer to discover for myself.

Frederick Wiseman

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I write my novels personally, desperately and non-negligently. When I write my novels, I think about my novels only, and never do other works.

Haruki Murakami

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In novels and autobiographies, the first positive move that the immigrant makes towards assimilation is to buy himself a suit of city clothes.

Jonathan Raban

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Unfortunately, I don't get to read nearly as much as I want because I'm always working on my own stuff, either the novels or newspaper columns.

Carl Hiaasen

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My first published novel, American Rust, took three and a half years of full-time work to write. But I wrote two apprentice novels before that.

Philipp Meyer

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The whole idea of interviews is in itself absurd - one cannot answer deep questions about what one's life was like - one writes novels about it.

Anthony Powell

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Personally, one of the most helpful things I learned was three-act structure. For my first four or so novels, I built the structure intuitively.

Marcus Sakey

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I started out as a poet. I've always been a poet since I was 7 or 8. And so I feel myself to be fundamentally a poet who got into writing novels.

Alice Walker

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I don't read novels whilst I'm writing one; I just haven't got a wide enough brain to concentrate on incoming and outgoing in the same time zone.

Dawn French

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I am glad it's [California novel] resonated with people because, for me, most apocalyptic novels aren't scary, because they feel so very far off.

Edan Lepucki

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I didn't know anything about Opus Die except from pop culture, like Dan Brown novels, which I knew wasn't really knowing anything about Opus Die.

Wes Bentley

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If I did only one thing at a time I'd think I was wasting my time. If, for example, I only wrote novels I would feel like a charlatan and a fraud.

Peter Ackroyd

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I know I'm not a wordsmith. And I don't write poetry. Sometimes I think I should, because it's really helpful. But I always wanted to write novels.

Candace Bushnell

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The question I hate the most is "How did you DO it - write novels and raise your children simultaneously!" I mean, do MALE authors get asked that??

Jodi Picoult

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On the whole, I think you should write biographies of those you admire and respect, and novels about human beings who you think are sadly mistaken.

Penelope Fitzgerald

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If you study your own struggles, the struggles of others, even in movies or novels you'll see the root of all their suffering is always attachments

Yasmin Mogahed

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It was always a false assumption that white American writers cannot write novels about race unless they're approaching it from a very oblique angle.

Jess Row

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I'm a fast writer, and crime novels are easy to do. It's much harder to write a 1,000 word article, where everything has to be 100 per cent correct.

Steig Larsson

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I feel quite at home writing short stories but nervous and anxious when writing novels, as if the bad time of consecutive failures might arise again.

Charles Baxter

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I like all sorts of things, not necessarily just Victorian. Even though I tend to read a lot of Victorian novels, I like a lot of contemporary stuff.

Colin Meloy

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Michael Koryta is an amazingly talented writer, and I rank The Prophet as one of the sharpest and superbly plotted crime novels I've read in my life.

Donald Ray Pollock

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I've always been a little bit more of a novel reader than a short story reader. I think the first books that made me want to be a writer were novels.

Nell Freudenberger

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Experiments with the "as if" of fiction are often more lively in poetry and criticism and other modes of writing than in weak short stories or novels.

Ben Lerner

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I do not repeat conversations that I can't remember. And it's something that irritates me a great deal, because I think most memoirs are false novels.

Paul Auster

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The novels were all right for a while until she found out that most of them were like the movies - all about the pretty ones who really own the world.

Theodore Sturgeon

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I usually have more than one thing I'm working on at once - I've been working on three different novels. When I get stuck on one, I hop back and forth.

Dan Chaon

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In all my stories and novels, no one ever escapes Louisiana. Maybe that is because my soul never left Louisiana, although my body did go to California.

Ernest Gaines

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I've worked out a Ninja Replacement Score for novels. It's basically the number of characters that need to be replaced by ninjas to make the book good.

Janni Lee Simner

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Many of the comedies I had made in Sweden were slightly based on semi-autobiographical experiences, so adapting novels was a very different experience.

Lasse Hallstrom

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The rule for finding plots for character-centered novels, which is to ask: 'So what's the worst possible thing I can do to *this* guy?' And then do it.

Lois McMaster Bujold

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I am concerned that people who admire [Ayn] Rand are not often critical enough of the extent to which she has abridged the implications of [her] novels.

Murray Bookchin

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Poorly written novels--no matter how pious and edifying the behavior of the characters--are not good in themselves and are therefore not really edifying.

Flannery O'Connor

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Plot is a map and I begin with it. It is what made me admire the novels of the 19th century; that the stories are foreshadowed. TheyÃre going someplace.

John Irving

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Movies and novels, the two things that informed and taught me the most, are forms of escapism. I thought that was how life could look if you wanted it to.

Jason Diamond

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Writing screenplays is incredibly hard. I can't call it joy. Writing Novels? Joy. Directing? Joy. Writing Screenplays? That's where you pay all your dues.

Stephen Chbosky

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Most gothics are overplotted novels whose success or failure hinges on the author's ability to make you believe in the characters and partake of the mood.

Stephen King

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I've always been really impressed with some of the longer graphic novels and thought it would be really amazing if one day I could try something like that.

Adrian Tomine

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I read Susanna Clarke's Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, which I think will subsequently be recognized as one of the first great novels of the 21st century.

Lev Grossman

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I never think there's any competition between films. I root for everybody's films. I especially have a fond place in my heart for graphic novels and comics.

Bruce Willis

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And I used to write novels and little stories and compositions and I - but I put them away because I started acting when I was 17. So there wasn't much time.

Joan Collins

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Now the novels that are read are purely entertainment " well done, very polished, with a very effective technique " but not literature, just entertainment.

Mario

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What's good about writing is that when you write novels or fiction, people can see that the problems in one region are similar to problems in another region.

Ngugi wa Thiong'o

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There are lots of authentic, moving characters in so-called systems novels, just as there are certainly deep structural ideas in some character-driven novels.

Dana Spiotta

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I closed my own jazz bar so I could be a man who can write novels as I like. I was pleased about that. This pleasure was connected to the pleasure of writing.

Haruki Murakami

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My first two novels were set in the past, and that freed me up in a lot of ways; it allowed me to find my way into my story and my characters through research.

Jennifer Gilmore

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The ideal reader of my novels is a lapsed Catholic and failed musician, short-sighted, colour-blind, auditorily biased, who has read the books that I have read.

Anthony Burgess

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My books are based on emotions, feelings, relationships. In these areas women are experts, so it's not strange that the main characters of my novels are females.

Isabel Allende

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Novels are more difficult simply because they are longer and require more juggling, but short stories are closer to perfection, if you can get the language right.

Colum McCann

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Get Carter remains among the great crime novels, a lean, muscular portrait of a man stumbling along the hard edge - toward redemption. Ted Lewis cuts to the bone.

James Sallis

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Sylvieâs knowledge, like Izzie's, was random yet far-ranging, âThe sign that one has acquired oneâs learning from reading novels rather than an educationâ¦

Kate Atkinson

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Leo knew next to nothing about governesses, save for the drab creatures in novels, who tended to fall in love with the lord of the manor, always with bad results.

Lisa Kleypas

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[Moralistic] novels are at the same disadvantage as teachers: children never believe them, because they make everything that happens relate to the lesson at hand.

Madame de Stael

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When I write my novels I don't really have a huge plan beforehand; I don't have the whole plot and architecture, so the story is sort of discovered as I write it.

Michael Ondaatje

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I do think that sports is really rich dramatically that, and this is kind of a self-serving thing to say, but I wonder why there aren't more, better sports novels.

Chad Harbach

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I read a lot of graphic novels - some of my favorites graphic novelists or artists are Rebecca Kraatz, Gabrielle Bell, Graham Roumieu, Tom Gauld, and Renee French.

Matthea Harvey

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I came into screenwriting from an odd direction, because the first screenplay that I read was and is better as writing than the top one percent of literary novels.

William Monahan

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Novels should be judged rigorously. Either a book works or it doesn't. The fact that something is true in the real world should not lend authority to it in fiction.

Akhil Sharma

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I have often heard that the novel is dead. But I see novels produced, I don't know how many a week, in France. I have the impression it's carrying along quite well.

Nathalie Sarraute

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Novels are usually built on conflict, sometimes very, very difficult conflict. It's why men write war novels - because there you go, there's the conflict writ large.

Anna Quindlen

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I think books in which people are really happy and things are going well are probably the most challenging novels there are to write, and there are very few of them.

Anna Quindlen

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So much as I enjoy big novels of epic sweep, I often find, say, if they follow several generations, by the third generation, I'm not caring about the people anymore.

Emma Donoghue

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The novels that attract me most... are those that create an illusion of transperancy around a knot of human relationships as obscure, cruel and perverse as possible.

Italo Calvino

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The movies are fun, but I'm a novelist. In many ways, screenwriting is much easier than writing novels. I find screenplays twenty times easier to write than a novel.

Nicholas Sparks

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I've read about eight or ten of the original novels, and one of them is where Maigret's in bed for the entire story! His wife is running around and solving the case!

Rowan Atkinson

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Of the first seven novels I wrote, numbers four and five were published. Numbers one, two, three, six, and seven, have never seen the light of day... and rightly so.

Sue Grafton

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Mostly it's lies, writing novels. You set out to tell an untrue story and you try to make it believable, even to yourself. Which calls for details; any good lie does.

Anne Tyler

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I read fiction all the time. It's true that I don't like fantasy or science fiction. I like "realistic" novels, particularly those in which nothing much ever happens.

Gustavo Perez Firmat

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A surprising number [of novels] have been read aloud to me, and I like all if moderately good, and if they do not end unhappily-against which a law ought to be passed.

Charles Darwin

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When I was 13 or 14, I started devouring novels; literature took quite a while to take me over, but it caught up just in time to save me from becoming a mathematician.

Mark Haddon

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Foreign novels are less action-oriented. They have a different pace; they're more reflective. They challenge us to look for the story, find the story within the story.

Stephanie Perkins

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The place of my novels is Israel, almost without exception. All of them take place in Israel - in Jerusalem, in the desert, in the kibbutz, in small towns, in villages.

Amos Oz

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All middle-class novels are about the trials of three, all upper-class novels about mass fornication, all revolutionary novels about a bad man turned good by a tractor.

Christina Stead

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I obviously prefer writing novels but I take my journalism very seriously, and I enjoy doing it between novels. It gives me an opportunity to move in the outside world.

Mordecai Richler

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I have a very strong sense of architecture in my novels. But at first it's sometimes like building a doorknob before you have a door, and a door before you have a room.

Nicole Krauss

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This is one of his most human and most amusing and witty novels. The characters are very Indian. I decided that I wanted to do a comedy, so this was just the right one.

Thomas Kretschmann

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Your life story is a novel; and people, though they love novels wound between two yellow paper covers, are oddly suspicious of those which come to them in living vellum.

Alexandre Dumas

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Novelists of a conservative or more purely aesthetic bent hold up better on the surface, but their novels go in and out of fashion according to relevance or irrelevance.

Jane Smiley

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I could have been a cult writer if I'd kept writing surrealistic novels. But I wanted to break into the mainstream, so I had to prove that I could write a realistic book.

Haruki Murakami

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I asked a French critic a couple of years ago why my books did so well in France. He said it was because in my novels people both act and think. I got a kick out of that.

Jim Harrison

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This was my first novel [The Dissemblers ]. I've never seriously written short stories, and actually find short stories much more intimidating as an art form than novels.

Liza Campbell

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A book is basically just symbols arranged to form this story, this world. But on the other hand, books, novels, literature in general, is what shows us at our most human.

Shane Warren Jones

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It is quite possible--overwhelmingly probable, one might guess--that we will always learn more about human life and personality from novels than from scientific psychology

Noam Chomsky

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My advice is to write about what you are interested in. If you read science fiction and fantasy, then write in that genre. If you read romance novels, then try writing one.

Michael Scott

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But you will be hard-pressed to find more than a few novels, films, news stories, and TV shows that dare to depict life as a gift whose purpose is to enrich the human soul.

Rob Brezsny

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I wrote a whole novel before The Beach. Unpublishable. Junk. But, for some reason I stuck at novels and wrote a second. Still not sure why I didn't give up. Stubborn, maybe.

Alex Garland

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Walter Scott has no business to write novels, especially good ones. He has fame and profit enough as a poet, and should not be taking the bread out of other people's mouths.

Jane Austen

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Empathy lies at the heart of Gatsby, like so many other great novels-the biggest sin is to be blind to others problems and pains. Not seeing them means denying their existence.

Azar Nafisi

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His gaze slid over me like a veil of fire. He could ignite my deepest desires with a single glance. I decided right then and there no more reading romance novels by candelight.

Darynda Jones

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Novels are almost like music or poetry - they just come to me in simple sentences, whereas I think my pieces get more and more complex ever since I've started using a computer.

Joan Didion

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To the question: How do the authors of sketches, stories and novels get along in life, the following answer can or must be given: They are stragglers and they are down at heel.

Robert Walser

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Life is sometimes novel-shaped, mocking the efforts of those authors who, in an effort to make their novels life-shaped, spurn the easy symmetry and cheap resonance of reality.

Stephen Fry

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Novels for me are how I find out what's going on in my own head. And so that's a really useful and indeed critical thing to do when you do as many of these other things as I do.

Cory Doctorow

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I first told the idea to an editor I had met who, after reading one of my novels for adults that was set in a high school, had an idea that I might write something for children.

Daniel Handler

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Good novels are not written by orthodoxy-sniffers, nor by people who are conscience-stricken about their own orthodoxy. Good novels are written by people who are not frightened.

George Orwell

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In order to capture Mid-World for new readers, I had to streamline the original tale [ The Gunslinger Born], but I also had to incorporate scenes from earlier Dark Tower novels.

Robin Furth

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Gordon eyed them with inert hatred. At this moment he hated all books, and novels most of all. Horrible to think of all that soggy, half-baked trash massed together in one place.

George Orwell

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It really does feel, partly because of graphic novels kids read, like there's a lot of freedom with how you can use both images and words, because we think in both of those ways.

Lynne Rae Perkins

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It's rather useless to write a gripping narrative with nothing in it but climate change because novels are always about people even if they purport to be about rabbits or robots.

Margaret Atwood

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I hate it when something I've had published "inspires" some nut to imitate what I've written, or some teacher gets fired for having her students read one of my stories or novels.

Richard Matheson

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I've been told by people who write historical novels that you just sort of write the emotional truth first, the story at the core, and then you go back and research it at the end.

Jami Attenberg

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There are these boutique writers out there who think if they are not writing their novels sitting at a bistro with their laptops, then they're not real writers. That's ridiculous.

Rick Bragg

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[Harry] had always suffered from a vague restlessness, a longing for adventure that she told herself severely was the result of reading too many novels when she was a small child.

Robin McKinley

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I abhor crime novels in which the main character can behave however he or she pleases, or do things that normal people do not do, without those actions having social consequences.

Steig Larsson

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Life is painful and disappointing. It is useless, therefore, to write new realistic novels. We generally know where we stand in relation to reality and don't care to know any more.

Michel Houellebecq

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Much like the French (or like ourselves, their apes),Who with strange habit do disguise their shapes;Who loving novels, full of affectation,Receive the manners of each other nation.

Guillaume de Salluste Du Bartas

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Modern reformers offer nebulous theories or write philanthropic novels. But your thief acts! He is as clear as a fact and as logical as a punch on the nose! And what a style he has!

Honore de Balzac

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Jim Harrison is someone I always enjoy, one of the great contemporary writers. I like Tim Ferris' Big Boom Theory. I'm getting into a different kind of reading, not straight novels.

Hunter S. Thompson

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I have a lot of stuff that I never published because I always had a sense that novels were not finally going to be the way I made my living, because the form was dying commercially.

William Monahan

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With every sentence she writes, Davis freshens the senses. Her novels achieve a tone thatâs unlike anyone elseâs, creating an atmosphere you donât so much interpret as breathe.

Kevin Brockmeier

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I love writing journalism because it's all over in two hours and comes straight off the top of the head. Writing novels is soooooo much harder. It's the hardest thing I've ever done.

Rachel Johnson

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We like to look out on the world and see ourselves, so we have many, many novels, memoirs, and short stories in Iraq that are largely about Americans in Iraq, doing what Americans do.

Elliott Colla

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I got interested in the question of literacy because writers are always moaning about why more people don't read books. They long for the good old days when people read serious novels.

Robert Hass

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But novels are never about what they are about; that is, there is always deeper, or more general, significance. The author may not be aware of this till she is pretty far along with it.

Diane Johnson

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But are they all horrid, are you sure they are all horrid? [Referring to Gothic novels, fashionable in England at the beginning of the 19th century, but frowned upon in polite society.]

Jane Austen

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I work seven days a week, from 9 in the morning till 8 at night. I have the titles of the next eight novels I want to write. I feel myself pitiable, degraded on a day that I don't write.

Orhan Pamuk

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Short stories and some short novels are close to poetry--with the fewest words they capture the essence of a situation, of a human being. It's like trying to pin down the eternal moment.

Gina Berriault

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I don't just want my books to be about the '30s and '40s. I want them to read as if they had been written then. I think of them as '40s novels, written in the conservative narrative past.

Alan Furst

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I was in school for literature, and read so many 19th century and early 20th century novels that it was hard to break out of that and read an average Jeanette Winterson book or something.

Colin Meloy

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I hate that rule that says write about what you know, it leads to too many British novels about marriages going slightly wrong. Write about what you don't know, just act as though you do.

Jeff Noon

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When I start writing novels, I go into them with a spirit of inquiry, rather than to substantiate prejudices I had in the beginning. If you don't do that, you can't write good characters.

Ruth Ozeki

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When I started, I was pretty sure I was going to be writing some goofy little wizard novels that might make me some part-time money and would hopefully lead to something I could do better.

Jim Butcher

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We don't read novels to have an experience like life. Heck, we're living lives, complete with all the incompleteness. We turn to fiction to have an author assure us that it means something.

Orson Scott Card

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I calmed myself by walking into my nearby bookstore and marveling at all the books other people had written. So many people had finished and published novels; it couldn't be so hard, right?

Heidi Julavits

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I myself love to read those Victorian novels which go on and on, and you don't read them in one sitting. You might read one over the course of a summer, but that isn't what I want to write.

Joan Didion

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I'm not writing novels, the screenplays are my novels, so I'm gonna write it the best that I can. If the movie never gets made, it'd almost be okay because I did it. It's there on the page.

Quentin Tarantino

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I'm very excited about some of the novels that I have adapted. I think they're equally as powerful, if not more. Going After Cacciato (by Tim O'Brien) is something I'm very passionate about.

Gabe Polsky

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But my philosophy is that plot advancement is not what the experience of reading fiction is about. If all we care about is advancing the plot, why read novels? We can just read Cliffs Notes.

George R. R. Martin

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If the novels are still being read in 50 years, no one is ever going to say: 'What's great about that sixth book is that he met his deadline!' It will be about how the whole thing stands up.

George R. R. Martin

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At conventions, one of the standard questions I get is, 'Are you writing any new novels?' To which I used to respond, in my smart-[alec] fashion, 'No, I've decided to write only old novels.'

Peter David

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Since I became a novelist I have discovered that I am biased. Either I think a new novel is worse than mine and I don't like it, or I suspect it is better than my novels and I don't like it.

Umberto Eco

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I can only write one novel at a time. The author of the Perry Mason novels, Erle Stanley Gardner, often worked on four novels simultaneously, and produced a million words a year. I'm envious.

James Thayer

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The violence and double-talk in the Alice books probably does no harm to children, but the novels should not be allowed to circulate indiscriminately among adults who are undergoing analysis.

Martin Gardner

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One of the things that happens in novels it's almost like a continual debate with yourself. That's why you're writing the book. It's why you create characters: so you can argue with yourself.

Michael Ondaatje

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I've found that writing novels is an all-absorbing experience - both physical and mental - and I have to do it every day in order to keep the rhythm, to keep myself focused on what I'm doing.

Paul Auster

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There are twenty-four characters in this book named Max. Let there be an end to this silly business of authors never giving their own names to characters in their novels. False modesty, faugh!

Max Shulman

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These are all novels, all about people that never existed, the people that read them it makes them unhappy with their own lives. Makes them want to live in other ways they can never really be.

Ray Bradbury

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Muse, time has taught me that all metaphysical systems, even historical facts given as truths, are hardly that, so I amuse myself with more agreeable lies; I no longer read anything but novels.

Mary Wortley Montagu

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I love grand scale. One of the things that everybody mentions is that my novels are beautiful objects in the sense that the elements of the actual book are being extruded and re-contextualized.

Richard Grossman

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I find in most novels no imagination at all. They seem to think the highest form of the novel is to write about marriage, because that's the most important thing there is for middle-class people.

Gore Vidal

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Most - and I mean maybe 99% or more - graphic novels are simply fat comicbooks. The term is a bogus, cocked-up concept some marketing whizkid conceived to get comics on the shelves of bookstores.

Jim Steranko

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Research is always the best part. As we dug deeper into the history and mythology behind each of the hallows, we discovered more and more stories - some of them deserving of novels in themselves.

Michael Scott

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In this world, artists are joyous. Unpredictability is the life of their paintings, their music, their novels. They delight in events not forecasted, happenings without explanation, retrospective.

Alan Lightman

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We must begin to understand the nature of intertextuality . . . the manner by which texts poems and novels respond to other texts. After all, all cats may be black at night, but not to other cats.

Henry Louis Gates

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Conspiracies and all the theories of conspiracy are a part of the canon of fakes. And I'm involved, in all of my writings, the theoretical ones as well as the novels, with the production of fakes.

Umberto Eco

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Most novels, if they are successful at all, are original in the sense that they report the existence of an area of society, a type of person, not yet admitted to the general literate consciousness.

Doris Lessing

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I was born into the century in which novels lost their stories, poems their rhymes, paintings their form, and music its beauty, but that does not mean I have to like that trend or go along with it.

Pat Conroy

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Oh! And they read English novels! David! Did you ever look into an English novel? Well, do not trouble yourself. It is nothing but a lot of nonsense about girls with fanciful names getting married.

Susanna Clarke

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It may be old hat, but I see no reason to close off what is for me a fruitful subject of inquiry, especially so for one, like me, who is very much interested in creating stories and novels of ideas.

Norman Lock

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I have a suspicion - I have to be careful what I say - that you might actually find the best comics actually written by people who are comics writers and who aren't setting out to do graphic novels.

Terry Pratchett

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The Neapolitan novels have a lot of references to things outside, to things of the world, to culture, politics, the city of Naples. People have mentioned that Naples is like a character in the novels.

Ann Goldstein

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Ironically, I come from a family of lawyers - my dad, my grandfather, and now my oldest son. And some of my very best friends are lawyers, though they don't resemble the ones that appear in my novels.

Carl Hiaasen

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Our need to identify with representative figures is something that never goes away. We still find those in novels. We find those in television. We find them in movies. We find them all over the place.

Matthew Specktor

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If politicians can't do it, I want to do it. We have to do it. Artists, put it in paintings. Poets, put it in poems, novels. That's what we have to do. And I think it's so important to save the world.

Michael Jackson

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I haven't the stature to critique one of our literature's great novels, Tobias; and I'm not one of those who believe The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn needs critiquing for literary or social reasons.

Norman Lock

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Novels arenât just happy escapes; they are slivers of peopleâs souls, nailed to the pages, dripping ink from veins of wood pulp. Reading the right one at the right time can make all the difference.

Brandon Sanderson

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I think the recent cluster of WWII novels is so good because we have reached an optimal distance from the war. Just as a lens has its focal length, the novel also has its best distance from the action.

Chris Cleave

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As strange as this may sound, I very seldom read fiction. Because my novels require so much research, almost everything I read is non - fiction - histories, biographies, translations of ancient texts..

Dan Brown

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The secret of keeping young is to read children's books. You read the books they write for little children and you'll keep young. You read novels, philosophy, stuff like that and it makes you feel old.

John Cheever

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I'm just trying to look at something without blinking, to see what it is like, or it could have been like, and how that had something to do with the way we live now. Novels are always inquiries for me.

Toni Morrison

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I do not travel. I am not much of an extrovert, and I'm not much interested in extroverted objects. I do not care for the 'ideas' of novelists. Novels are wonderful, of course, but I prefer newspapers.

Will Cuppy

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I believe that people should write biographies only about people they love, or understand, or both. Novels, on the other hand, are often better if they're about people the writer doesn't like very much.

Penelope Fitzgerald

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I'm easily persuaded that a really good novelist who gets inside somebody else's head could be serving a valuable purpose. I enjoy satirical novels that take a wry, humorous, ironic look at modern life.

Richard Dawkins

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It's a feeling of happiness that knocks me clean out of adjectives. I think sometimes that the best reason for writing novels is to experience those four and a half hours after you write the final word.

Zadie Smith

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In novels, I said, people are transfigured by love. Theyâre elevated, made different, lifted out of their ordinarinessâ¦Itâs not so much to ask, I said. I just want love to live up to its publicity.

Anatole Broyard

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Once outside the magic circle the writers became their lonely selves, pondering on poems, observing their fellow men ruthlessly, putting people they knew into novels; no wonder they were without friends.

Barbara Pym

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Historical novels are about costumery. I think that's the magic and mystery of fiction. I don't want to write historical fiction but I do want the story to have the feel of history. There's a difference.

Chang-Rae Lee

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He shivered. His coat was thin, and it was obvious he would not get his kiss, which he found puzzling. The manly heroes of the penny dreadfuls and shilling novels never had these problems getting kissed.

Neil Gaiman

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Novels with a "thesis" don't interest me. They just don't - novels that want to "show" something, that want to "argue" something specific. I don't read novels that are looking to convince me of anything.

Sergio Chejfec

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Narratives have the same power, I think. Some readers of my novels ask me, "Why do you understand me?". That's a huge pleasure of mine because it means that readers and I can make our narratives relative.

Haruki Murakami

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All novels . . . are concerned with the enigma of the self. As soon as you create an imaginary being, a character, you are automatically confronted by the question: what is the self? How can it be grasped?

Milan Kundera

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Books and novels in particular that grapple with quite a few things are difficult to explain, so I think that first line can come in a substitute for trying to form a longer sense of what the book is about.

Alice Sebold

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I hope my novels will allow you to become lost in a world totally unlike the actual world we live in. I work hard to make the words evoke particular images, thoughts, feelings, the mystery of relationships.

Jay Neugeboren

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When I was researching my very first novel, "The Basic Eight," I was calling right-wing political and religious organizations and asking them to mail me their material so that I could mock them in my novels.

Daniel Handler

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My decision to view the world through novels, as it were, which is a typically European way of looking at things, became a heavy burden for me. But I took it on consciously, even though it was torture for me.

Orhan Pamuk

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When I was a teenager, I thought how great it would be if only I could write novels in English. I had the feeling that I would be able to express my emotions so much more directly than if I wrote in Japanese.

Haruki Murakami

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Often I don't read novels. The script is more important, that's the springboard to your imagination, really. Peripheral information can be interesting to read but you can't use it when it's not in the script.

John Hurt

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I believe there are two ways of writing novels. One is mine, making a sort of musical comedy without music and ignoring real life altogether; the other is going right deep down into life and not caring a damn.

P. G. Wodehouse

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I've published several virtually invisible novels and several dozen even more invisible short stories over the years, all of which give me joy - unlike the cumulative experience of seeking publishers for them!

Scott Bradfield

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When I'm writing novels, even screenplays, it's never an actor I have in mind; it's always the version in my head of who the character is. Once somebody gets cast, I have to adjust a little bit to who they are.

Jonathan Tropper

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Wasn't it his right to listen to opera, read poetry and adventure novels, go to Europe every couple of months for some reason or another, and drive his Porsche over the speed limit until he found out who he was?

Anne Rice

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We have to diversify, we have to find work we can do that helps other people while helping ourselves, work that has to do with writing that isn't necessarily just writing saleable novels or getting huge advances.

Alice Mattison

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Books of quick interest, that hurry on for incidents are for the eye to glide over only. It will not do to read them out. I could never listen to even the better kind of modern novels without extreme irksomeness.

Charles Lamb

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That's how I work, whether with stories or novels - they start with an image that comes to me in a daydream, and a lot of times I'm walking around with these pictures in my head for awhile before I start writing.

Dan Chaon

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Is it not superfluous to write more than one novel if the writer has not become, say, a new man? Obviously, all the novels of an author not infrequently belong together and are to a certain degree only one novel.

Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel

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I can't imagine otherwise - I guess Virginia Woolf could write wonderful novels where the women never have sex, and her novels work. But for me, I don't think I could write a plot without sex happening somewhere.

Shirley Geok-lin Lim

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Sometimes someone will tell me about an author I've never heard of before and that will send me to that person. That's how I discovered Thomas Bernhard, an Austrian novelist whose novels tend to be one long rant.

Stephen Dobyns

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We all have a lot of people inside us, yet we get to live only one life. Fiction lets us slip into someone else's skin, so to speak. That's why we read novels, and also why we write them"to experience more life.

Steven Saylor

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Maybe someone's who's a different kind of writer [would think otherwise] - someone who'd be just as comfortable writing essays on what their novels are about. Sometimes you feel like certain novelists are like that.

Chang-Rae Lee

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Comic books are what novels used to be - an accessible, vernacular form with mass appeal - and if the highbrows are right, they're a form perfectly suited to our dumbed-down culture and collective attention deficit.

Charles McGrath

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As a writer I have persisted in my uncertainty, alternating between novels which could charitably be considered literature and world reporting which by another stretch of objective standards might be called history.

James A. Michener

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I read anything I could get my hands on: science fiction, fantasy, horror, thrillers. I even became hooked on the Bantam reprints of the old pulp novels from thirties and forties: Doc Savage, The Shadow, The Avenger.

James Rollins

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The inspiration for my novels comes from the depths of a creative well, based on asking myself questions over and over. I try to write something different each time I sit down to write; I try to surprise the readers.

Nicholas Sparks

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I'm not imprisoned in any one medium. In films I use techniques that are not necessarily what other directors attempt. When I write novels I also use techniques which can run counter to those that a novelist would use.

Philippe Claudel

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There are a lot of snobs out there who disregard these books (romance novels), but they fulfil a need. I am happy and fulfilled in what I am doing and readers love them. And why not? They are harmless and they are fun.

Sara Craven

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I'm trying to break myself of that habit [of not writing out a first draft ] because I'm working on a couple novels and I know if I tried to write those books the way I wrote the stories it would take me years to finish.

Donald Ray Pollock

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In America they have to know just what you are-- novelist, poet, playwright... Well, I've been all of them... I think poems and novels and stories spring from the same seed. It's not like, say, playing polo and knitting.

Robert Penn Warren

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I don't see myself as a very important person. But I was the second woman to write a novel in Iran, and I have written most of the novels about Iranian women. In this way, maybe I have a good place in Iranian literature.

Shahrnush Parsipur

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People live for love. They kill for love. They die for love. They have songs, poems, novels, sculptures, paintings, myths, legends. It's one of the most powerful brain systems on Earth for both great joy and great sorrow.

Helen Fisher

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If people only knew what lies at the heart of my novels! What a tumult of desires these carefully written pages conceal! I sometimes have a loathing for the furious cravings that give me no peace except when I am working.

Julien Green

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First of all, the novel should be a critique of the novels that have come before it in a language that broadens the audience of American literature. Second, it's really got to be invested in a number of what-if questions.

Kiese Laymon

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There is interest in a crime-based reality show. With my novels, we are now editing the second book in a series about a defense lawyer whose name is Samantha Brinkman. And I am reviewing speaking engagement opportunities.

Marcia Clark

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All my novels are very much directly related to my inner life, even though I'm inventing characters, even though it's fiction, even though it's make-believe, it nevertheless is coming out of the deepest recesses of myself.

Paul Auster