First Novel Quotes

I think, we can only write very personal matters through our experience. When I named my first novel about my son A Personal Matter, I believe I knew the most important thing: there is not any personal matter; we must find the link between ourselves, our personal matter, and society. ~ Kenzaburo Oe

My first novel was rejected by some of the most eminent publishers in the world. Starting again was a real wrench. ~ Wilbur Smith

I had a writing professor at Brandeis who told me I'd never make it - and when I sold my first novel a few years later, I sent him a copy! ~ Caroline Leavitt

I'm happy when I write. I've written my first novel, my pencil is down. My last work has been written. No turning back. No more hesitation. I'm writing my future one page at a time. Inspire. Dream. Live. Breath. Happy. Succeed. ~ Missy Salick

Last week I was just someone who had had a first novel published. ~ Jon McGregor

Though I didn't quite plan it that way, I had my two sons at just about the same ages my mother saw me and my sister off to college, and my first novel was published when I was 46. This 'tardiness' isn't something I'm proud of, but I'm happy to be an inspiration to others who arrive at these milestones later than most of us do. ~ Julia Glass

My first novel, 'You Must be Sisters,' was started in Pakistan. I've wrote several novels and a TV drama set or partly-set there. ~ Deborah Moggach

My literary career kicked off in 1956 when, as a resident of Swansea, South Wales, I published my first novel, 'Lucky Jim.' ~ Martin Amis

I completed my first novel when I was 19 years old. ~ Danielle Steel

I was twenty-seven when I came up with the idea for my first novel. ~ Jane Green

To be shockingly original with your first novel, you don't have to discover a new technique: Simply write about people as they are and not as the predominantly liberal and humanist literary establishment believes that they ought to be. ~ John Braine

I want to write more books, see my first novel made into a film, fight more campaigns, work in more countries. I want to be able to recall experiences that have endured for their pleasure and range and intensity. ~ Alastair Campbell

But then it came time for me to make my journey - into America. [ ... N]o coincidence that my first novel is called Americana. That became my subject, the subject that shaped my work. When I get a French translation of one of my books that says 'translated from the American', I think, 'Yes, that's exactly right. ~ Don DeLillo

The Little Friend is a long book. It's also completely different from my first novel: different landscape, different characters, different use of language and diction, different approach to story. ~ Donna Tartt

Vonnegut's earliest novels hint strongly at his familiarity with Wiener's work, The Human Use of Human Beings, especially his first novel, Player Piano (1952), which shows his concern for the social implications of automation, the replacement of human beings with machines. ~ David Porush

I suppose I also have a fondness for Cities because it was my first published novel - writing it got me over what had, up until that time, seemed like an insurmountable hurdle - the writing and completion of a novel. Oh, I'd begun several novels over the years, but never had the staying power or the faith in my own work to finish one. ~ Lucy Taylor

When I was working on my first novel, 'The Quilter's Apprentice,' I knew I wanted to write about friendship, especially women's friendship and how women use friendship to sustain themselves and nurture each other. ~ Jennifer Chiaverini

Chechnya forms the bookends to Tolstoy's career. He began writing his first novel, 'Childhood,' while in Starogladovskaya in Northern Chechnya, and his final novel, 'Hadji Murad,' is set in the Russo-Chechen War of the 19th century. ~ Anthony Marra

The conditions of writing change absolutely between the first novel and the second: the first is an adventure, the second is a duty. The first is like a sprint which leaves you exhausted and triumphant beside the track. With the second the writer has been transformed into a long-distance runner - the finishing tape is out of sight, at the end of life. He must guard his energies and plan ahead. A long endurance is more exhausting than a sprint, and less heroic. ~ Graham Greene

I always tell people, if a young girl read "Beloved" as her first novel, she'd have to kill either herself or her mother, because in "Beloved" you have a mother killing their children. This is not something a child would accept very easily. And would never understand. ~ Walter Mosley

My first novel was turned down by about twenty publishers over a period of two and a half years. Because my name is Irish and would not be familiar to English editors, one of them said: 'If she writes anything else, do let us know.' Slowly, very slowly, the books began to sell and be noticed. ~ Colm Toibin

Anyway, several rewrites later, Del Rey Books did publish my first novel, and it did become the first work of fiction on the New York Times trade paperback bestseller list. ~ Terry Brooks

When I wrote 'The Pregnant Widow' three or four years ago, I tried to reread my first novel, 'The Rachel Papers,' because their young heroes are the same age. I couldn't finish it. It seemed to me so technically slapdash and weak. ~ Martin Amis

I think there really is no other way to write a long, serious
novel. You work, shelve it for a while, work, shelve it again,
work some more, month after month, year after year, and then
one day you read the whole piece through and, so far as you
can see, there are no mistakes. (The minute it's published and
you read the printed book you see a thousand.) This tortuous
process is not necessary, I suspect, for the writing of a popular
novel in which the characters are not meant to have depth and complexity, where character A is consistently stingy and character
B is consistently openhearted and nobody is a mass of
contradictions, as are real human beings. But for a true novel
there is generally no substitute for slow, slow baking.
We've all heard the stories of Tolstoy's pains over Anna Karenina,
Jane Austen's over Emma, or even Dostoevsky's over Crime and Punishment, a novel he grieved at having to publish prematurely,though he had worked at it much longer than most popular-fiction writers work at their novels. ~ John Gardner

My first novel, 'The Tiger's Daughter,' embodies the loneliness I felt but could not acknowledge, even to myself, as I negotiated the no man's land between the country of my past and the continent of my present. ~ Bharati Mukherjee

I am really Chloe Anthony Wofford. That's who I am. I have been writing under this other person's name. I write some things now as Chloe Wofford, private things. I regret having called myself Toni Morrison when I published my first novel, The Bluest Eye. ~ Toni Morrison

I remember how surprised I was when my first novel was about to be published and I was informed that I could be sued for anything any one of my characters said. 'But I often don't agree with what they say,' I protested. The lawyer was not interested in the clear distinction I make between my own voice and the voices of my characters. Neither, I have found, are many of my readers. ~ Jane Rule

With this first novel, I am just above the foothills, but I see the path to the top, and it is my desire to write compelling stories about everything that I find of interest. ~ Guy Johnson

You write your first novel with the desperation of the damned. You're afraid that you'll never write anything else, ever again. ~ Patricia Duncker

When I was submitting my first novel, I had no idea that publishing scams existed. I never encountered any, but I could have - and knowing how easily I might have been taken advantage of makes me determined to protect others from falling into that trap. ~ Victoria Strauss

I never thought I would write an autobiography, probably because my first novel, Go Now, is really all drawn from my life, even though it's more about the psychology going on. ~ Richard Hell

My dream was to be known as a writer and to be able to produce at least one book that would be read by people. That dream came true with the publication of my first novel - and all the rest has been a sweet bonus. ~ Robert Cormier

When my first novel was published, I went in great excitement round bookshops in central London to see if they had stocked it. ~ Antony Beevor

In 1980, I published my first novel, in the usual swirl of unjustified hope and justified anxiety. ~ Julian Barnes

Around 1980, I'd been writing short stories, all to no success; so I wrote a fan letter to Stephen King and asked "How long should it take an aspiring writer to either get published or know when to give up?" Lo and behold, King wrote back to me in long hand with blue flair pen on 14-inch paper, purveying a very nice, helpful note; in it he said my letter proved a "command of the language," that I should never give up, and that it would take years to succeed, not months. "That's cold comfort but it's the truth." This was the ultimate encouragement for a young writer to be who didn't know shit about the market. I took Mr. King's advice and actually sold my first novel little more than a year later. I'll always be copiously grateful for this advice, and it's the same advice I give aspiring writers now (along with the story of King's reply!). ~ Edward Lee

When you write your first novel you don't really know what you're doing. There may be writers out there who are brilliant, incisive and in control from their first 'Once upon a time'. I'm not one of them. Every once upon a time for me is another experience of white-water rafting in a leaky inner tube. And I have this theory that while the Story Council has its faults, it does have some idea that if books are going to get written, authors have to be able to write them. ~ Robin McKinley

My first novel, 'Leaving Atlanta,' took at look at my hometown in the late 1970s, when the city was terrorized by a serial murderer that left at least 29 African-American children dead. ~ Tayari Jones

One can feel the immense joy of Amy Hill Hearth's engagement in her first novel. It radiates through every scene and through every page. Sometimes, an exceptional writer finds an exceptional premise, and the result is a truly exceptional book. Such is the case with Miss Dreamsville ... The writing is brilliant, especially the dialogue through which the characters are defined. ~ Philip K. Jason

My first novel took almost six years to sell and was rejected 37 times in the interim, and then finally sold for the smallest amount of money my literary agent had ever negotiated for a work of fiction. ~ Daniel Handler

I finished my first novel - it was around 300 pages long - when I was 16. Wrote one more before I got out of high school, then wrote the first Lincoln Perry novel when I was 19. It didn't sell, but I liked the character and I knew the world so I tried what was, in my mind, a sequel. Wrote that when I was 20, and that one made it. ~ Michael Koryta

I am proudest of that first novel, 'Trust,' of anything I have written. I don't think I've had such intense energy since. ~ Cynthia Ozick

I felt an unfamiliar sympathy for my parents. I seemed unable to take good care of myself, but I wanted to take care of them. For all that I'd tried to disown, and had, I was their perfect alchemy: my father's mother's willfulness and preference of singing to socks full of cash, and my father's need for his own way, somewhere far from most people; my mother's side's obsession with good marks, appearances, lots of noise, and never having enough. By now I had stood in front of many rooms, my first novel in hand. They always asked why you became a writer. An impossible question, but my four-headed answer floated up easily. Immigration gave me a million stories. Learning a new language at nine rather than zero left me astonished by what words could do. Because my people never expressed negative feelings directly (not a bequest of our totalitarian surroundings, but because they wished, above all, to show love, and what kind of love was it, they thought, if you disagreed openly?), I had to learn how to listen for what was meant rather than said, becoming acutely observant. That same love, however, meant I was never discouraged from speaking. A table of adults would fall silent so I could ask, or say. That last was the key: A fellow immigrant writer friend with a nearly identical background had only the first three, and had to work much harder to find the courage to put words on a page. I owed to my elders the career that hand given them such alarm. ~ Boris Fishman

My first novel didn't sell well. It was really painful and humiliating and shocking to me. ~ Maria Semple

I began my first novel when I was 15. It went through three drafts, of around 40,000 words each. If I find it, I'll burn it. ~ Charles Stross

English Passengers, a first novel by Matthew Kneale, relates what follows when a group of Englishmen arrive in mid-nineteenth-century Tasmania with different purposes: to find the Garden of Eden, to prove the natives are less intelligent than the British, and to escape from British law. Kneale also describes the tragic life of a young Aboriginal whose experiences are shaped by the arrival of the British. ~ Nancy Pearl

Recently SCHISMATRIX became my first novel to come out in Finland. Perhaps there's a quality in a good translation that can't be captured with the original. ~ Bruce Sterling

I've found in the past that the more closely I identify with the heroine, the less completely she emerges as a person. So from the first novel I've been learning techniques to distance myself from the characters so that they are not me and I don't try to protect them in ways that aren't good for the story. ~ Beth Gutcheon

In Jenny Offill's remarkable first novel, 'Last Things,' 7-year-old Grace Davitt watches her mother, Anna, descend into madness and tries to make sense of the claustrophobic world that Anna has created for her. ~ Nancy Willard

In 2011, I did an internship in Seven Dials, a junction in London where seven roads come together. I'd given up on writing after multiple rejections for my first novel, and I was starting to consider a career in publishing instead, but Seven Dials gave me such a strong idea for a setting that I couldn't resist picking up my pen again. ~ Samantha Shannon

The disappointing second novel is measured against the brilliant first novel - often no novel lives up to the first. Literary improvement seems like an unfair expectation. ~ Billy Collins

My first novel, 'Man Walks Into a Room,' is about a man who's lost his memory and has to start a second life. On one level, it's about how we create a coherent sense of self. ~ Nicole Krauss

Sabine Baring-Gould wrote the hymn "Onward, Christian Soldiers" and, more unexpectedly, the first novel to feature a werewolf. ~ Bill Bryson

Because his art is such
a difficult one, the writer is not likely to advance in the world
as visibly as do his neighbors: while his best friends from high
school or college are becoming junior partners in prestigious
law firms, or opening their own mortuaries, the writer may be
still sweating out his first novel. ~ John Gardner

I wrote the first draft of my first novel at Michigan, and then I wrote the first draft of 'Salvage the Bones' at Stanford. So I workshopped the entire thing. ~ Jesmyn Ward

All my life I have been trying to learn, to read, to see and hear, and to write. At sixty-five I began my first novel and after the five years, lacking a month, I took to finish it, I was still traveling, still a seeker. ~ Carl Sandburg

The reality that we were growing up in was very young and vibrant, and nobody was capturing that part of India. I started to backpack after getting out of college. I hiked and did a lot of things nobody was capturing in art at all in India, so I wrote my first novel. It was a very, trippy, experience-filled novel, and it ended up doing very well in India because nobody was writing about that at that point. ~ Karan Bajaj

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. ~ Rachel Kushner

Since my first novel was rescued from a slush pile, it makes me sad that most publishing houses no longer accept unsolicited manuscripts. Nor are many willing to take chances on novels that are not deemed immediately "marketable." ~ Katherine Paterson

When I wrote my first book, 'The Tennis Party', my overriding concern was that I didn't write the autobiographical first novel. I was so, so determined not to write about a 24-year-old journalist. It was going to have male characters, and middle-aged people, so I could say, 'Look, I'm not just writing about my life, I'm a real author.' ~ Sophie Kinsella

Wrote my first "novel" when I was six. Studied a bit in college, but then pursued history ... But when I started writing professionally, it was mostly learn as you go. ~ David B. Coe

My first novel, 'You Lost Me There,' has been described as a beach read. Tough bracket, beach reads. There's not much room for mistakes when you're competing against the sun for a person's attention. ~ Rosecrans Baldwin

If you caricature friends in your first novel they will be upset, but if you don't they will feel betrayed. ~ Mordecai Richler

Before my first novel, I was dating a woman who later went to prison for bashing a guy with a hammer. ~ Gary Shteyngart

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

I did not have any philosophy at all when I wrote the first novel. I was just wanting to capture experiences that I thought would be inspiring for Indians who are trying to break free from the very high-pressured family environments and do their own thing. ~ Karan Bajaj

I started my first novel when I was 10, and have produced thousands of pages of juvenilia since. ~ Ned Beauman

I was thinking about what I wanted to write next, after my first novel, and had decided that I wanted to write a story with a lot of strong female characters in it. ~ Joan D. Vinge

My first novel - the novel I wrote before 'Midnight's Children' - feels, to me, now, very - I mean, I get embarrassed when I see people reading it. You know, there are some people who, bizarrely, like it. Which I'm, you know, I'm happy for. ~ Salman Rushdie

I always imagined a writer was someone who lived in an attic in Paris, but my mum instilled in me a belief that I could do anything - so I ended up writing my first novel while working nights as a news reporter. ~ Jojo Moyes

(T)here are worse things than falling on your face right out of college ... Like instant, unearned success. Like getting your first novel accepted by the first publisher you send it to. Like getting your first rejection slip at the age of thirty-five. ~ Jincy Willett

Believe it or not, I sold my first novel, 'Crank,' with only seventy-five pages complete. It was in verse then, and it was hard-hitting then. ~ Ellen Hopkins

My first novel was called 'Betrayed by F. Scott Fitzgerald,' about the difficulties of graduating from college, the longing and mourning you feel when all your promise seems to float away. ~ Ron Carlson

Doing crime films ... maybe it's to some extent a matter of taste. Certainly my first novel had a criminal element and was about the similarity of criminals and artists. Pretextually, it was sort of a money bag thriller. But it was aggressively not what it seemed to be. It was kind of Duchamps. ~ William Monahan

Some people thought I was using my popularity as a singer to sell my first novel. For others, it was almost a sacrilege: a practitioner of a minor art daring to enter the field of high art. ~ Chico Buarque

I just want people to finish the book and say, 'I was entertained.' When I set out to do it, I had no deal in place. I knew it would be tough. I read somewhere that John Steinbeck was turned down 22 times on his first novel. But I was just going to do it. ~ Marv Levy

The short story that eventually grew into Constellation was the first fiction set in Russia that I'd ever written, and that was right around the time I was giving up on a doomed, never-to-be-seen first novel. While I saw it could be something bigger, in hindsight fortuitous timing was as responsible as anything. ~ Anthony Marra

I started blogging in 2006 when I had sold my first novel but it had not yet been published, in those anxious months in between while I learned the whole process. ~ Laini Taylor

Andi Teran's first novel is vivid and fully realized, an entire universe expertly condensed into the pages you hold in your hands. Ana herself is a complicated delight, and by the end of the book I wanted to scoop her up into my arms. ~ Emma Straub

This first print run of the first edition of my first novel, 'When The Lion Feeds.' back in 1964, is so rare it can fetch several thousand pounds at auction. I always wanted to be an author, and I decided to write about what I knew. ~ Wilbur Smith

You know what I did after I wrote my first novel? I shut up and wrote twenty-three more."
("The Castle") ~ Michael Connelly

My first novel is loaded with food references largely because my cupboards were bare, and I was writing hungry. ~ Jan Karon

I'm one of those sad cases who've never wanted to be anything but a writer. I started writing my first novel when I was five years old. I have no idea what it was about, but I do remember spending considerable time trying to get the title right, though this had more to do with crayon colour than scansion. ~ Justine Larbalestier

I've had over a dozen and a half novels published since late 1994 when my first novel, 'Brother to Dragons, Companion to Owls' came out. ~ Jane Lindskold

In course of time my first novel appeared. It was a love story. ~ George Barr McCutcheon

My first job was to run a concessions cart. Later, I found a position at the Pacific Film Archive. Thus began a long series of jobs, each one slightly better than the last, that continued for a decade, until I sold my first novel, and still goes on, even now. ~ Mona Simpson

In 1996, when my first novel, 'Masquerade,' was published, I knew international thrillers - or spy novels, if you prefer - had been the domain of male authors for decades. ~ Gayle Lynds

I had been a reporter for 15 years when I set out to write my first novel. I knew how to research an article or profile a subject - skills that I assumed would be useless when it came to fiction. It was from my imagination that the characters in my story would emerge. ~ Amy Waldman

What is the distance between here and there, between now and then, between right and wrong? In Greg Baxter's pellucid first novel, 'The Apartment,' it may be simply the length of a day - but a day in which one travels surprisingly far, literally and figuratively. ~ Stacey D'Erasmo

Writing is difficult. You do it all alone without encouragement and without any certainty that you'll ever be published or paid or even that you'll be able to finish the particular work you've begun. It isn't easy to persist amid all that. [ ... ] Sometimes when I'm interviewed, the interviewer either compliments me on my 'talent', my 'gift' or asks me how I discovered it. [ ... ] I used to struggle to answer this politely, to explain that I didn't believe much in writing talent. People who want to write either do it or they don't. At last I began to say that my most important talent - or habit - was persistence. Without it, I would have given up writing long before I finished my first novel. It's amazing what we can do if we simply refuse to give up. ~ Octavia E. Butler

In the past, the poverty they shared had a certain sweetness about it. When the end of the day came and they would eat their dinner in silence with the oil lamp between them, there was a secret joy in such simplicity, such retrenchment. ~ Albert Camus

My first novel, 'Sacrifice,' was set on the Shetland Islands. ~ Sharon Bolton

I was 29 when I wrote my first novel. But I was 45 when I quit for good. I was a 16-year overnight success. ~ Richard North Patterson

I think what happens to young writers is that they use up every life experience that they have had up to that point for their first novel. Then you have to come up with something for the second novel, but you really don't have anything to say. ~ Lee Smith

I wrote my first novel, 'Deadline,' in 1994 as an experiment. ~ Randy Alcorn

One easy mistake to make with the first novel is to expand the short story. Some things are better as a story; you cannot dilute things into a novel. I think the first hundred pages of a novel are very important. That's where you set things up: the world, the characters. Once you've set that up, it'll be much easier. ~ Yiyun Li

HBO and I have a deal to at least try to make a television series from the Leonid McGill stories. We're going to start with the first novel, 'The Long Fall.' ~ Walter Mosley

I spent the period reading the first novel assigned for English. And wow. If I hadn't realized I was in France yet, I do now. Because Like Water for Chocolate has sex in it. LOTS of sex. ~ Stephanie Perkins

When I was very little, four or five, I did comic strip drawings, so my first novel had no words. I couldn't write and thought adult handwriting was a mysterious scribble. When I was 14, my grandmother gave me a typewriter and I started writing in a different way. ~ Joyce Carol Oates

I have a lot of blurring between fiction and non-fiction in so many of my works. For example, my first novel, 'When Nietzsche Wept,' has a great deal of non-fiction in it. I didn't create many characters at all. Almost all of them are historical characters that actually existed. ~ Irvin D. Yalom

I found my first novel difficult. I don't want to make it sound like it's any more difficult than driving a cab or going to any other job, but there are so many opportunities for self-doubt, that you just kind of need to soldier on. ~ Anthony Doerr