Novel Writing Quotes

You're looking for something, I don't know what I'm looking for, but I'm looking. Writing is a lot about that. When you write a poem. When you write a novel.

After writing each novel, I would spend days poring over suggestions from my editor.

I kept going back while I was writing the novel - which never sold, may it rest in peace - and by the time it was finished I had too many connections to Haiti to walk away.

While writing a novel I almost completely stop reading books in the same sub-genre for the duration.

Ironically, writing a novel is not a way to sort out your confusion.

When one is writing a novel in the first person, one must be that person.

I suppose I started writing seriously at 16 years old. I thought I wrote a novel at 16 and sent it to New York! They sent it back because it wasn't novel.

What we know about writing the novel is the novel.

Writing a long novel is like survival training. Physical strength is as necessary as artistic sensitivity.

Writing a first novel takes so much effort, with such little promise of result or reward, that it must necessarily be a labour of love bordering on madness.

I started writing seriously when I was 18, wrote my first novel when I was 22, and I've never stopped writing since.

Writing a novel is a lot like directing a movie because you are creating a world and a tone, you are creating a large canvas and all the details.

Try writing...a list, a letter, a journal, a novel, a declaration.

I don't talk about my books while I'm writing them: not even my husband knows what a novel's about until it's done.

Writing a novel is like childbirth: once you realize how awful it really is, you never want to do it again.

Writing a novel is like knocking on a door that will never open. You are so desperate to get in, you will say or do anything. You feel: please take my novel.

Writing a novel is always complicated, it's not like you snap your fingers and go, 'Ah, I know what I'll write'. For me, a lot of the time, I have to write and as I write, I learn about the story.

Writing a first novel was an arduous crash course. I learned so much in the six years it took me to write it, mostly technical things pertaining to craft.

I wanted to write a novel. At 12 I knew, I am a writer. I said it to nobody.

Writing a good query letter has very little to do with writing a good novel. But if you can't write the one, it makes it really hard to get the other published.

Each piece of writing I undertake, whether a story, novel, play, or poem, begins with an image.

As for writing about temptation, there's no drama without temptation, and no novel without drama.

What interests me in writing a novel is taking really remote voices, characters, and stories and beginning to create some kind of web.

What's the challenge in writing a novel that few people will read? I'm more than happy writing what I do and have no plans to change that.

When I am writing a novel I try not to read great prose stylists into which I will fall.

First of all, all writing includes some part of the self. The relationship of the self and the other exists in writing, whether autobiographical or novel. There is a self and an other.

If you're writing a novel, you're in a room for three or four years. There's not much coming in from the outside.

For me, writing a novel is like solving a puzzle. But I don't intend my novels as puzzles. I intend them as invitations to dance.

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.

You think you're writing one historical novel and it turns into three, and I'm quite used to a short story turning into a novel - that's happened through my whole career.

I've always wanted to write a novel. It's overwhelming and daunting, and it's one of those things that every writer fantasizes about doing.

When you're writing a novel, you're still telling a story. But you're telling it very differently. It's a craft like anything else.

I've been writing for a long time. I sat down to write my first novel in the middle of March of 1982.

I write novels and other things.

I always knew writing a novel was a great thing.

Writing novels is an essentially amateur activity.

Writing a novel, I am making is an object that has a life and identity of its own, apart from me.

The biggest downside to being a novelist is writing the novel.

There isn't, unfortunately, any way of discovering whether you can write a publishable novel except by writing it.

Writing a novel is a lot like reading one.

For me, writing a short story is much, much harder than writing a novel.

When writing a novel, I'm not smart enough to know how to foreshadow something if I don't know what it is.

Writing a novel is like an amusement park or a museum or a city. You go into that place and you have certain experiences and those experiences, hopefully, have some impact on you.

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

Principles in a poor is admirable as politeness in a prince.

Sacrifice of the self is sheer stupidity if sacrifice is not for the self.

Action is the pulse of any good story, but the character is the heart. If the action has no consequence to the character, the story loses heart.

War is not just the shower of bullets and bombs from both sides, it is also the shower of blood and bones on both sides.

The salt is to the food, what soul is to the body.

Some people when they see cheese, chocolate or cake they don't think of calories.