Novel Writing Quotes

I've been asked which of the other arts novel-writing is most like, and I have come to believe it is acting. Of course, in terms of pattern it can be like music, in terms of structure it can be like painting, but the job to me is most like acting.

Novel-writing is the only place where someone who would have liked to do anything can still do that vicariously.

Novel writing is solitary work.

Novel writing is a kind of private pleasure, even if nothing comes of it in worldly terms.

The only difficulty is to know what bits to choose and what to leave out. Novel-writing is not creation, it is selection.

A poet can survive everything but a misprint.

I'm a failed poet. Maybe every novelist wants to write poetry first, finds he can't, and then tries the short story, which is the most demanding form after poetry. And, failing at that, only then does he take up novel writing.

Novel writing wrecks homes.

NaNo[ National Novel Writing Month] is an awesome opportunity to stretch your writing muscles and gives you permission to write in a way you probably wouldn't do in a normal circumstance.

A logic proof is: you get a starting point and an ending point, and you have to get there through all these different steps and tautologies. I approach novel writing that way. When I get to the end I have to go back and connect everything.

If you're a playwright, unless you're really lacking in get-up-and-go, you can always get your play up somewhere. You can't necessarily make a living doing it, but theater is about meeting an audience. Plays are not easier to write necessarily, they take less time to write. If you get them up, it's a much more rough-and-tumble kind of existence. I think it's, from my perspective, easier than novel writing.

Everytime I read 'Pride and Prejudice' I want to dig her up and beat her over the skull with her own shin-bone.

I never really had novel-writing instruction like people do in MFA programs.

I wish every American explored the importance of novel writing, identity, honesty, character and place in fresh-ass ways.

Novel-writing is a settling, lovely space. I call it self-indulgent - I feel mildly guilty about it.

When I am writing fiction, I believe I am much better organized, more methodical - one has to be when writing a novel. Writing poetry is a state of free float.

The recent extraordinary discovery in Photography, as applied in the operations of the mind, has reduced the art of novel-writing to the merest mechanical labour.

Nothing beats novel writing because it's complete expression of you. You just control everything. Not even a movie director has that level of control.

Novel writing is far and away the most exhausting work I know.

I certainly wake up every morning and thank God that I'm not a novelist because the theater is tough, but novel writing is infinitely harder. Especially with the economics of serious fiction being what they are in America.

The dull people decided years and years ago, as everyone knows, that novel-writing was the lowest species of literary exertion, and that novel reading was a dangerous luxury and an utter waste of time.

It's none of their business that you have to learn how to write. Let them think you were born that way.

Not that the story need be long, but it will take a long while to make it short.

I try to create sympathy for my characters, then turn the monsters loose.

It is perfectly okay to write garbage – as long as you edit brilliantly.

Everybody walks past a thousand story ideas every day.

Writing is like driving at night in the fog. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.

There are three rules for writing a novel. Unfortunately, no one knows what they are.

Novel-writing can be a cold-blooded business. One uses whatever happens to be lying around in memory and employs it to suit one’s end….Then, again, during the months whilst one is writing about the past, a story is colored by what presently is happening to its writer. So, imperceptibly, the tone of voice changes, original intentions slip away. And I found myself looking through another window at a darker landscape inhabited by neither the present nor the past.

There's no money in poetry, but then there's no poetry in money, either.

The central problem of novel-writing is causality.

Novel writing should never be confused with journalism. Unfortunately, in the case of Primary Colors, a fair number of journalists confused.

A lot of novelists start late-Conrad, Pirandello, even Mark Twain. When you're young, chess is all right, and music and poetry. But novel-writing is something else. It has to be learned, but it can't be taught. This bunkum and stinkum of college creative writing courses! The academics don't know that the only thing you can do for someone who wants to write is to buy him a typewriter.

My own experience is that once a story has been written, one has to cross out the beginning and the end. It is there that we authors do most of our lying.

Updike worked this way, and I just kinda borrowed it from him. So the memoir will be relief from novel writing for a moment.

Not getting bored of my own story and/or character is one of the main struggles I have had with novel writing, and I have put to bed big chunks of work that just didn't sustain my interest.

If you don't have the time to read, you don't have the time or the tools to write.

If I'm writing a novel, I'll probably get up in the morning, do email, perhaps blog, deal with emergencies, and then be off novel-writing around 1.00pm and stop around 6.00pm. And I'll be writing in longhand, a safe distance from my computer. If I'm not writing a novel, there is no schedule, and scripts and introductions and whatnot can find themselves being written at any time and on anything.

I love deadlines. I like the whooshing noise they make as they go by.

There's many a bestseller that could have been prevented by a good teacher.

Everywhere I go, I'm asked if I think the universities stifle writers. My opinion is that they don't stifle enough of them. There's many a best seller that could have been prevented by a good teacher.

If you write one story, it may be bad; if you write a hundred, you have the odds in your favor.

A good novel tells us the truth about its hero; but a bad novel tells us the truth about its author.

Almost anyone can be an author; the business is to collect money and fame from this state of being.

I haven't any right to criticize books, and I don't do it except when I hate them. I often want to criticize Jane Austen, but her books madden me so that I can't conceal my frenzy from the reader; and therefore I have to stop every time I begin. Every time I read Pride and Prejudice I want to dig her up and beat her over the skull with her own shin-bone.

I love the sound of words, the feel of them, the flow of them. I love the challenge of finding just that perfect combination of words to describe a curl of the lip, a tilt of the chin, a change in the atmosphere. Done well, novel-writing can combine lyricism with practicality in a way that makes one think of grand tapestries, both functional and beautiful. Fifty years from now, I imagine I’ll still be questing after just that right combination of words.

Novel writing, to me, is all about language: choosing your words, finding the characters within the words and just really agonizing over every word. It's really crafting this whole piece from nothing.

There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.

There isn't, even now, a great tradition of novel-writing in Afghanistan. Most of the literature is in the form of poetry.

Novel writing is like heroin addiction; it takes everything you've got.