#novel

I've had a lot of books rejected in my time. My first novel, which didn't get published, was, with hindsight, crashingly dull. ↗

— Helen Fielding

#dull #first #get #had #hindsight

Comics seldom move me the way I would be moved by a novel or movie. ↗

— Daniel Clowes

#i #me #move #moved #movie

But at the same time, I have trouble keeping things out of books, which is why I don't write short stories because they turn into novels. ↗

— Jonathan Coe

#books #i #into #keeping #novels

But I have always - ever since The Accidental Woman - written novels about individuals attempting to make choices in the context of situations over which they have no control. ↗

— Jonathan Coe

#accidental #always #attempting #choices #context

I have two ideas for novels at the moment, neither of them all that conventional, but I'm not ready to choose between them yet, let alone settle down to the process of writing. ↗

— Jonathan Coe

#between #choose #conventional #down #i

When you read a novel, your own imagery is the most important. It's what makes reading such a wonderful thing. ↗

— Daniel Craig

#important #makes #most #novel #own

As writers we live life twice, like a cow that eats its food once and then regurgitates it to chew and digest it again. We have a second chance at biting into our experience and examining it. ...This is our life and it's not going to last forever. There isn't time to talk about someday writing that short story or poem or novel. Slow down now, touch what is around you, and out of care and compassion for each moment and detail, put pen to paper and begin to write. ↗

— Natalie Goldberg

#compassion #cow #detail #examination #experience

Cooper wrote a novel which is absolutely indistinguishable from Austen, completely from a female point of view, completely English, no sense that he was an American. ↗

— Leslie Fiedler

#american #austen #completely #cooper #english

My conception of a novel is that it ought to be a personal struggle, a direct and total engagement with the author's story of his or her own life. This conception, again, I take from Kafka, who, although he was never transformed into an insect, and although he never had a piece of food (an apple from his family's table!) lodged in his flesh and rotting there, devoted his whole life as a writer to describing his personal struggle with his family, with women, with moral law, with his Jewish heritage, with his Unconscious, with his sense of guilt, and with the modern world. Kafka's work, which grows out of the nighttime dreamworld in Kafka's brain, is *more* autobiographical than any realistic retelling of his daytime experiences at the office or with his family or with a prostitute could have been. What is fiction, after all, if not a kind of purposeful dreaming? The writer works to create a dream that is vivid and has meaning, so that the reader can then vividly dream it and experience meaning. And work like Kafka's, which seems to proceed directly from dream, is therefore an exceptionally pure form of autobiography. There's an important paradox here that I would like to stress: the greater the autobiographical content of a fiction writer's work, the *smaller* its superficial resemblance to the writer's actual life. The deeper the writer digs for meaning, the more the random particulars of the writer's life become *impediments* to deliberate dreaming. ↗

— Jonathan Franzen

#kafka #novel #writing #dreams

And the nice thing about writing a novel is you take your time, you sit with the character sometimes nine years, you look very deeply at a situation, unlike in real life when we just kind of snap something out. ↗

— Sandra Cisneros

#character #deeply #just #kind #life