Novel Writing Quotes

Quotes tagged as "novel-writing" Showing 1-30 of 229
Jack Getze
“You don’t have to be around long to understand the world is a frightening place, that life includes situations you have no control over, that anything can happen. Everybody needs friends and a family.”
Jack Getze, Making Hearts

Roman Payne
“Who is better off? The one who writes to revel in the voluptuousness of the life that surrounds them? Or the one who writes to escape the tediousness of that which awaits them outside? Whose flame will last longer?”
Roman Payne

Jack Getze
“only a handful of pregnant women are like Emily; that is, they go to the hospital with pain and get the surprise of their life by delivering a child. Using Emily’s least-favorite math term, decimals, the number would be 0.0004 percent of all U.S. births. About fifteen hundred surprise babies a year.”
Jack Getze, Making Hearts

Roman Payne
“Rich will be my life if I
can keep my memories full
and brimming, and record
them on clear-eyed
mornings while I set
joyously to work setting
pen to holy craft.”
Roman Payne, Rooftop Soliloquy

Joan Gelfand
“Seven-thirty. Time. Time is a Mobius strip. Coding. Working. Training. An endless ribbon of activity; iterations, pushing, perfecting. Doug heads for his car, not sure why he is leaving, or, where he is going.”
Joan Gelfand, Extreme

Graham Greene
“With a novel, which takes perhaps years to write, the author is not the same man he was at the end of the book as he was at the beginning. It is not only that his characters have developed--he has developed with them, and this nearly always gives a sense of roughness to the work: a novel can seldom have the sense of perfection which you find in Chekhov's story, The Lady with the Dog.
Graham Greene

Linda W. Yezak
“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.”
Linda Yezak

Pat Conroy
“Throughout my career I’ve lived in constant fear that I wouldn’t be good enough, that I’d have nothing to say, that I’d be laughed at, humiliated—and I’m old enough to know that fear will follow me to the very last word I’ll ever write. As for now, I feel the first itch of the novel I’m supposed to write—the grain of sand that irritates the soft tissues of the oyster. The beginning of the world as I don’t quite know it. But I trust I’ll begin to know it soon.”
Pat Conroy, A Lowcountry Heart: Reflections on a Writing Life

Nan Shepherd
“As a matter of fact, I read few novels. They bore me. I never wanted or intended to write one myself, and can't tell you why I did it.”
Nan Shepherd

Fiona McCulloch
“The case of Ballantyne's The Coral Island is instructive, for the author had never seen a coral island, or, indeed, a palm tree, or a coconut, and his novel is a construction out of his reading of other books, some of which are pillaged to the point of plagarism. The textual bricolage is matched by the ironic presentation of the imperial values which it is generally assumed the book exists to promote: a pirate by the name of 'Bloody Bill' is allowed to articulate how useful religion is to the advancement of trade (and plunder).”
Fiona McCulloch, The International Companion to the Scottish Novel

« previous 1 3 4 5 6 7 8