Lesbian Novel Quotes

Do you prefer him or her? Either one's cool-I'm genderfluid. ~ Mvxx. Amillivn

Any government I lead will continue with the equality of gay and lesbian people. ~ David Cameron

All novels are sequels; influence is bliss. ~ Michael Chabon

I've heard Stephen King say that when you write a novel you end up revealing everything about yourself. ~ Ernest Cline

I hadn't ever felt any particular calling to be a novelist, and I clearly remember telling a friend of mine about six months before I started work on 'Elsewhere' that I would never write a novel. ~ Gabrielle Zevin

Then she leans forward, and before I have time to say or think another word, she's kissing me. And I'm kissing her, too.
It starts almost in slow motion. Her lips, soft on mine, light little kisses, tiptoeing. Then she opens her mouth slightly, kissing me with more force. I keep thinking about how perfectly our mouths fit together. Her lips are so gentle, her tongue drawing me in. I'm losing myself in her. ~ Liz Kessler

She was like a heroine in a novel that she herself was writing the character kept protesting that she was too strong for love and yet the narrator went on describing her desire. ~ Anna Godbersen

But life could not be lived between the pages of a romance novel. ~ Barbara Bell

On Ira Gershwin:
I remember when he was given the manuscript of a novel written by a woman friend who had hopes of having it published. To his astonishment it turned out to be the dirtiest, most pornographic book he had ever read. When the lady mentioned that she intended to use a nom de plume, Ira suggested she call herself Henrietta Miller. ~ Oscar Levant

You wanted to write novels, I created a novel with real people, with real blood, in reality. ~ Elena Ferrante

The novel 'World War Z' is told from the perspectives of so many people - speaking to the narrator - that there's no way a movie could capture all of them. Still, the idea of turning a zombie pandemic into a war story is fascinating and could have translated easily to film. ~ Annalee Newitz

I have written this book quicker than any other," she notes in her diary, "[and] it is all a joke; & yet gay & quick reading I think; a writers holiday. I feel more and more sure that I will never write a novel again ~ Virginia Woolf

A mystery novel localizes the awesome force of the real death outside the book, winds it tightly in a plot ... ~ Don DeLillo

I suppose I have written novels to find out what I thought about something and poems to find out what I felt about something. ~ May Sarton

The writing of a novel is taking life as it already exists, not to report it but to make an object, toward the end that the finished work might contain this life inside it and offer it to the reader. The essence will not be, of course, the same thing as the raw material; it is not even of the same family of things. The novel is something that never was before and will not be again. ~ Eudora Welty

Will Trystan, the vampire's, pending orthodontia work hinder his lust for blood? Find out in my upcoming novel . . . ~ Arielle Hunter

At last, after almost fifty years in the hopper, the most famous unpublished novel in America is in print. Who Shot the Water Buffalo? is a splendid story of comradeship in a time and place of constant peril, but it's Babbs's irrepressible exuberance and vast, affectionate good humor that make the story go. I love this novel. ~ Ed McClanahan

The characters act for reasons that they can't control and, as readers, we have to believe in their motivations, their sense of choice and in the reality of their suffering, even though, deep down, we know it's all just puppetry on the part of the writer. ~ Johnny Rich

To sing a song is quite different than to write a poem. I'm not and never will be a novelist, but to write a novel is not the same thing as writing a play. There is a difference in form, but essentially what you're after is the same thing. ~ Sam Shepard

Brands are useful ways of short-handing practically anything - look at the way Tom Wolfe first used brand name lists to sharpen up a character and a situation. Look at the most brand-referenced novel, Bret Easton Ellis's 'Glamorama.' ~ Peter York

If you always dreamed of writing a novel or a memoir, and you used to love to write, and were pretty good at it, will it break your heart if it turns out you never got around to it? If you wake up one day at eighty, will you feel nonchalant that something always took precedence over a daily commitment to discovering your creative spirit? If not
if this very thought fills you with regret
then what are you waiting for? ~ Anne Lamott

Let me tell you one thing about why writers write: had I known the answer to any of these questions I would never have needed to write a novel ~ Joan Didion

Ah, yeah. Yeah, tis awful all right. Well, your Mam wanted me to talk to you about it, but…'
He stopped; he didn't know what else to say.
'Yeah? Ah, I know the score, Dad. She wants me to be careful, is it?'
'Ah, no. Well, yeah; there's that, of course. No, she wanted… well, if you'd any questions, you
know?' I wasn't sure if he wanted me to say yes, or if he just wanted me to say no, and save him
having to be awkward. He looked lost. I felt like I wanted to save him
'No, I've no questions, Dad. It's all right, shur.' He looked at me then. His eyes went wet, like
he was going to start bawling. If we were in a film, he might have hugged me. But we were in
Limerick, so he just said:
'Well, so,' and put his one glove back on.

From The Boys of Summer ~ Ciarán West

Rocks, like louseworts and snail darters and pupfish and 3rd-world black, lesbian, militant poets, have rights, too. Especially the right to exist. ~ Edward Abbey

She dreamed of Venice. However, it wasn't a city alive with stars dripping like liquid gold into canals, or Bougainvillea spilling from flowerpots like overfilled glasses of wine. In this dream, Venice was without color. Where pastel palazzi once lined emerald lagoons, now, gray, shadowy mounds of rubble paralleled murky canals. Lovers could no longer share a kiss under the Bridge of Sighs; it had been the target of an obsessive Allied bomb in search of German troops. The only sign of life was in Piazza San Marco, where the infamous pigeons continued to feed. However, these pigeons fed not on seeds handed out by children, but on corpses rotting under the elongated shadow of the Campanile. ~ Pamela Allegretto

Jane Austen wrote six of the most beloved novels in the English language, we are informed at the end of Becoming Jane, and so she did. The key word is beloved. Her admirers do not analyze her books so much as they just plain love them to pieces. ~ Roger Ebert

It is a strange thing, looking at the sea. When it is calm, or with only gentle ripples, it gives an impression of being soft and kind. But often, on such a calm, the wind suddenly blows, thrusting the water back into angry waves. At such times, in a certain sense, one feels sorry for the sea. Never of itself offensive to others, it is all too often attacked by wind and rain, the rain falling densely upon it, shaming the beauty of its calm face with a million bouncing bubbles. Were the wind to stop blowing, the ocean, surely, would never afflict the land with any calamity, nor would any human beings suffer. ~ Tan Kok Seng

The thing with regret is, you can only regret the past. So for you, that's healthy. Regret the past. Use it. Make a new future. Visit her often. The more the regret is pushed into the past, the easier it will be. ~ ― Vi Keeland, The Baller: A Down And Dirty Football Novel

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

One way of understanding a graphic novel is that it's an ambitious comic and one way or another my comics have had ambitions. I have no problem with escapism. When I get my depressions all I want to do is escape reality. ~ Art Spiegelman

There are sharply different, competing models of what trans advocacy looks like - those that seek to follow the path laid out by the most visible and well-funded lesbian and gay rights organizations in the US and those that seek to use grassroots strategies, center issues of race and poverty, and aim to dismantle harmful institutions and conditions to redistribute life chances. ~ Dean Spade

A novel is often a longer process in handling self-doubt. ~ Robert Sheckley

But if this biography suggests a varied and sympathetic apprehension of the world, it was with a far darker palette that Céline came to paint his word-pictures when he began writing in the late 1920's. Straightforward fear adumbrates his invective, which - despite the reputation he would later earn as a rabid anti-Semite - is aimed against all classes and races of people with indiscriminate abandon. Indeed, if "Ulysses" is the great modernist novel most inspired by a desire for humanistic inclusion, then "Journey" is its antithesis: a stream of misanthropic consciousness, almost unrelieved by any warmth or fellow-feeling. ~ Will Self

It's the opening line of a football game returned for a touchdown. Or fumbled.

It's what orange juice is to breakfast, the first minutes of a blind date, a salesman's opening remarks.

It sets the tone, lights the stage, greases the skids for everything to follow.

It's the most important part of everything you'll ever write because if it doesn't work, whatever follows won't matter. It won't get read.

It's your opening paragraph. And enough can't be said about its importance.

Seduction. That's basically what leads are all about--enticing the reader across the threshold of your book, novel or article--because nothing happens until you get 'em inside.

And you literally have only seconds to do it because surveys show that eight out of ten people quit reading whatever it is they've started after the first fifty words. ~ Lionel Fisher

My novels are in the literature section as opposed to the romance section of bookstores because they're not romance novels. If I tried to have them published as romances, they'd be rejected. I write dramatic fiction; a further sub-genre would classify them as love stories. ~ Nicholas Sparks

I don't think I ever intended specifically to write for the young adult market. It's just that when the idea for City of Bones came to me, I knew the main characters were teenagers. In my mind they were just very clearly the ages they were, which turned out to mean it was a YA novel. ~ Cassandra Clare

I think the novel is not so much a literary genre, but a literary space, like a sea that is filled by many rivers. The novel receives streams of science, philosophy, poetry and contains all of these; it's not simply telling a story. ~ Jose Saramago

Every novel is like this, desperation, a frustrated attempt to save something of the past. Except that it still has not been established whether it is the novel that prevents man from forgetting himself or the impossibility of forgetfulness that makes him write novels. ~ Jose Saramago

Today, there are more opportunities for writers in terms of access to larger success, but it's more difficult to publish a literary novel in the lower ranges. In other words, you almost have to hit a home run. You can hit a triple, maybe, but nobody's interested in a single. ~ James Lee Burke

Resistance outwits the amateur with the oldest trick in the book: It uses his own enthusiasm against him. Resistance gets us to plunge into a project with an overambitious and unrealistic timetable for its completion. It knows we can't sustain that level of intensity. We will hit the wall. We will crash.
The professional, on the other hand, understands delayed gratification. He is the ant, not the grasshopper; the tortoise, not the hare ... The professional arms himself with patience, not only to give the stars time to align in his career, but to keep himself from flaming out in each individual work. He knows that any job, whether it's a novel or kitchen remodel, takes twice as long as he thinks and costs twice as much. He accepts that. He recognizes it as reality. ~ Steven Pressfield

She was sleeping on the bed like a novel that is yet to be read and he sat on the floor, reading her, moving his fingers through her hair and staring at her face like she was magic that none ever understood. ~ Akshay Vasu

My second novel, 'The Luminaries,' is set in the New Zealand gold rushes of the 1860s, though it's not really a historical novel in the conventional sense. So far, I've been describing it as 'an astrological murder mystery.' ~ Eleanor Catton

One night, after they had made love, Pelletier got up naked and went looking among his books for a novel by Archimboldi. After hesitating for a moment he decided on The leather mask, thinking that with some luck Vanessa might read it as a horror novel, might be attracted by the sinister side of the book. She was surprised at first by the gift, then touched, since she was used to her clients giving her clothes or shoes or lingerie. Really, she was very happy with it, especially when Pelletier explained who Archimboldi was and the role the German writer played in his life.
"It's as if you were giving me a part of you", said Vanessa.
The remark left Pelletier a bit confused, since in a way it was perfectly true, Archimboldi was by now a part of him, the author belonged to him insofar as Pelletier had, a long with few others, instituted a new reading of the German, a reading that would endure, a reading as ambitious as Archimboldi's writing, and this reading would keep pace with Archimboldi's writing for a long time, until the reading was exhausted or until Archimboldi's writing - the capacity of Archimboldian oeuvre to spark emotions and revelations - was exhausted (but he didn't believe that would happen), though in another way it wasn't true, because sometimes, especially since he and Espinoza had given up their trips to London and stopped seeing Liz Norton, Archimboldi's work, his novels and stories, that is, seemed completely foreign, a shapeless and mysterious ver ~ Roberto Bolano

If you read a novel in more than two weeks you don't read the novel really. ~ Philip Roth

I think every first-person narrator in a novel should be compromised. I prefer that word to 'unreliable.' ~ Charles Palliser

Smelling the hint of his cologne. Hearing his voice speak her name. It was like reopening a cut you thought already healed and pouring salt directly into it. ~ Nicole Douglas

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

You hear the best stories from ordinary people. That sense of immediacy is more real to me than a lot of writerly, literary-type crafted stories. I want that immediacy when I read a novel. ~ Chuck Palahniuk