Novel Writing Quotes

As you write your novel, you gradually start thinking like some of your characters in it. And at times the writer may lose himself completely in some character.

Avijeet Das

Michael Palin : "I am sorry to interrupt you there Dennis, but he's crossed it out. Thomas Hardy here on the first day of his new novel has crossed out the only word he has written so far and he is gazing off into space. Ohh! Oh dear he's signed his name again."Graham Chapman: "It looks like Tess of the D'Urbervilles all over again."- Matching Tie and Handkerchief, "Novel Writing

Graham Chapman

Mostly writing requires massive dedication, a whole lot of time spent alone, way too much sitting, countless hours spent thinking hard, and unending and occasionally painful dedication to forming ideas and laboring over the production of sentences, paragraphs, scenes, dialogue, punctuation, and all the elements that go into writing a novel, a play, a screenplay, or a poem. When we're not writing, we're thinking, plotting, imagining, or editing, which can be far more tedious than cranking out first drafts.--Fire Up Your Writing Brain

Susan Reynolds

I am often told that the model of balance for the novelist should be Dante, who divided his territory up pretty evenly between hell, purgatory, and paradise. There can be no objection to this, but also there can be no reason to assume that the result of doing it in these times will give us the balanced picture it gave in Dante's. Dante lived in the thirteenth century, when that balance was achieved by the faith of his age. We live now in an age which doubts both fact and value, which is swept this way and that by momentary convictions. Instead of reflecting a balance from the world around him, the novelist now has to achieve one from a felt balance inside himself.

Flannery O'Connor

Writing a novel is like traveling the universe on foot.

Dennis R. Miller

With the right tools, you can write anything ...

Jeff Lyons

I was told, and indeed I saw several examples, that neither time nor place was much minded, and that I might hazard being equally careless of chronology and geography; but I piqued myself on having studied Aristotle, and scrupulously attended to the probabilities of time and place.

Charlotte Turner Smith

If Laura was so prolific with poems, and in truth she was, then what was the problem with Megan’s request? Couldn’t Laura, with a little doing, keep stringing together line after line of words and construct, in time, a novel? It seemed logical, but there was the matter of finding an idea and sustaining it. Only fire could do that. The fire of rebellion.Mario Vargas Llosa had not used the term “fire” exactly, but rather had discussed the presence of “seditious roots” that could “dynamite the world” the writer inhabited. He claimed that writing stories was an exercise in freedom and quarreling—out-and-out rebellion, whether or not the writer was conscious of it. And this rebellion, Vargas Llosa reminded his readers, was why the Spanish Inquisition had strictly censored works of fiction, prohibiting them for three hundred years in the American colonies.

L.L. Barkat

A new novel awaits my arrival, prepares for my careful inspection. Yet a novel is always a long dream that lives in me for years before I know where to go to hunt it out.

Pat Conroy

If she was going to write a novel, she felt defeated before she began, because someone might be coming along to pick it apart, looking for symbols like The Conch or The Whale, which seemed to have mythic proportions.

L.L. Barkat

Maybe you didn’t need to know anything special to write a work of fiction. Maybe you didn’t need to delve into some kind of life question you knew you’d lived. Perhaps your subconscious would do the job for you, if only you dared to dream.

L.L. Barkat

She meant you have to live a story for a time.''And?''And then you can write it, in time. What have you lived?''Kind of a personal question for Twitterland.''Kind of the perfect question to answer in fiction.

L.L. Barkat

One Bagatelle, and I’ll raise you a novel,” Megan had tweeted back.“Writing for tea? Now that would have been a solution for the British empire,” Laura returned.“Writing for me,” Megan had typed.“I’ll write you a tea fortune.”“No deal. I want a novel. September sounds good.

L.L. Barkat

You could use a moth like that as a symbol in a novel, but it was trite, wasn’t it? The old moth-to-the-flame image had been used and used again. It was the stuff of amateur poetry. And she, having so little experience crafting a story, would be the most in danger of falling into trite approaches. If she wrote a novel, it probably would be about her father. And the male Luna moth would haunt its pages. Everyone would recognize the work as that of a first novelist. “She wrote about herself through the lens of her father.”The really good novelists, Laura thought, put their fathers, and maybe their mothers too, deeper into the stories. Which, she suddenly thought, might redeem Melville just the littlest bit.

L.L. Barkat

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

He had entered another imaginative world, one connected to the beginning of his life as a writer, to the Napoleonic world that had been a lifelong metaphor for the power of art, for the empire of his own creation He began to dictate notes for a new novel, "fragments of the book he imagines himself to be writing." As if he were now writing a novel of which his own altered consciousness was the dramatic center, he dictated a vision of himself as Napoleon and his own family as the Imperial Bonapartes....William and Alice he grasped with his regent hand, addressing his 'dear and most esteemed brother and sister.' To them, to whom he had granted countries, he now gave the responsibility of supervising the detailed plans he had created for 'the decoration of certain apartments, here of the Louvre and Tuileries, which you will find addressed in detail to artists and workment who take them in hand.' He was himself the 'imperial e

Fred Kaplan

Turn your thoughts to novel writing—narrative, let it be about what it will, is read, because the mind quietly acquiesces, and it requires no trouble to think about it. On your part it will demand much less care in the composition. Never mind improbabilities—put together a sufficient number of facts—the more unlikely the better. If you are too idle to choose the trouble of inventing, collect eight or nine of the most popular works of that sort; take a piece of one, and a piece of another, and put them together, only a little altered, just to disguise them: never mind whether what the painters call keeping, can in this motley assemblage be attended to; nobody thinks about that: sprinkle the whole plentifully with horrors of some sort or other, to stimulate the languid attention, and you will have a certainty of a sale at least among the circulating libraries, which, after all, is the principal sale that can be expected; for who buy novels?—Who indeed buy books at all in these times?

Charlotte Turner Smith

I'll call any length of fiction a story, whether it be a novel or a shorter piece, and I'll call anything a story in which specific characters and events influence each other to form a meaningful narrative. I find that most people know what a story is until they sit down to write one. Then they find themselves writing a sketch with an essay woven through it, or an essay with a sketch woven through it, or an editorial with a character in it, or a case history with a moral, or some other mongrel thing. When they realize that they aren't writing stories, they decide that the remedy for this is to learn something that they refer to as "the technique of the short story" or "the technique of the novel." Technique in the minds of many is something rigid, something like a formula that you impose on the material; but in the best stories it is something organic, something that grows out of the material, and this being the case, it is different for every story of any account that has ever been written.

Flannery O'Connor

The fiction writer is an observer, first, last, and always, but he cannot be an adequate observer unless he is free from uncertainty about what he sees. Those who have no absolute values cannot let the relative remain merely relative; they are always raising it to the level of the absolute. The Catholic fiction writer is entirely free to observe. He feels no call to take on the duties of God or to create a new universe. He feels perfectly free to look at the one we already have and to show exactly what he sees.

Flannery O'Connor

One thing an early-on writer has to learn, is to be comfortable with and responsive to critique. When five people in a group tell you this chapter sucks; don’t snap back at them with, “Sure, but it gets better in another 6 or 7 chapters!”Listen. – Thank them. – Consider.They can look from a fresh perspective, and catch things that you might be too close to see.But, you will also learn along the way that not everyone in a group of relative amateurs themselves, is going to catch everything, and there will be a few who seem to never understand much of anything.Some will always want paragraphs chopped down to explosive missiles of passion, while others are more used to long composite paragraphs that I myself find impossible to wade through.You may, once you have hit your full stride and power, feel comfortable telling a few of them, “Look. This isn’t a diner. I don’t take orders: ‘I’m gluten intolerant; he can’t do salt; she’s allergic to peanuts ...’“If what I offer is a salad bar, then No; I am not going to fry you up a cheesesteak!

Edward Fahey

As a general rule, I surmise that most fictional stories are populated by misfits, changelings, and oddities, which is what makes the writing interesting and considered novel.

Todd Crawshaw

Landscape is to American painting what sex and psychoanalysis are to the American novel.

Robert Hughes

Novel-writing has in one respect an affinity to the drama—that time and distance are required to soften for use the harsher features that may be exhibited from real life; that it was almost impossible to bring forward events without touching on their causes; and that any tendency to political discussion, however liberal or applicable, was not to be tolerated in a sort of work which people took up with no other design than to be amused at the least possible expence of thought.

Charlotte Turner Smith

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

Amit Kalantri

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 W. Yezak

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

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

Seed becomes tree, son becomes stranger.

Amit Kalantri

Before you worry about the beauty of your body, worry about the health of your body.

Amit Kalantri

You can not control the thought, but you can control the tongue.

Amit Kalantri

The world is administered by rich but it is constructed by poor.

Amit Kalantri

Health is hearty, health is harmony, health is happiness.

Amit Kalantri

A slip of the foot may injure your body, but a slip of the tongue will injure your bond.

Amit Kalantri

One who doesn't recognise an opportunity is bigger loser than one who tries his hand at an opportunity.

Amit Kalantri

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.

Amit Kalantri

My spouse is my shield, my spouse is my strength.

Amit Kalantri

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

Amit Kalantri

Faster is fatal, slower is safe.

Amit Kalantri

Education makes your maths better, not necessarily your manners.

Amit Kalantri

Don't always use prudence for precaution, sometimes use it for progress.

Amit Kalantri

In modern times couples are more concerned about loyalty than love.

Amit Kalantri

Civilians enjoy their time because soldiers sacrifice their time.

Amit Kalantri

Before we complicated life with money, machines and missiles we did well with morals, manpower and meetings.

Amit Kalantri

Mixing old wine with new wine is stupidity, but mixing old wisdom with new wisdom is maturity.

Amit Kalantri

The wrong man is not always wrong because of his wrong actions, often he is wrong because of no actions.

Amit Kalantri

Words are better than weapons, wisdom is better than war.

Amit Kalantri

Don't compare the size of your roof with the size of the sky.

Amit Kalantri

Brilliance of the brain must be admired more than beauty of the body.

Amit Kalantri

Uniform of a soldier and uniform of a student both are equally needed for the nation.

Amit Kalantri

Simplicity saves strength.

Amit Kalantri

Action achieves ambition.

Amit Kalantri

Rich can live better than poor but they cannot live without poor.

Amit Kalantri

A powerful process automatically takes care of progress, productivity and profits.

Amit Kalantri

In general, poor is polite and rich is rude.

Amit Kalantri

Anything which you have in profusion is poison

Amit Kalantri

Prudence is precaution, prudence is protection.

Amit Kalantri

Most of the people readily accept the principle but resist its practice.

Amit Kalantri

An assembly is extra slow in taking actions.

Amit Kalantri

If where you are is worthwhile then where you are from doesn't matter.

Amit Kalantri

For few matters you need to be solo, for some matters you need soul mate and for many matters you need society,

Amit Kalantri

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Novel Writing Quotes

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