Unwritten Novel Quotes

Stephen's work does not call out to him in this way. It does not speak to him of secrets and stories. He wonders about the woman. He imagines a divorce, something that makes her look away rather than stroke her daughter's hair. To know more about her would be to have some riddle solved. An unwritten novel is in each of us, Woolf would say. ~ Maya Lang

What you have done to this point cannot be undone. What you do next ... It is still unwritten. ~ Mitch Albom

Is it really over?" Kurlansky lamented over the dry-docked Massachusetts cod fishermen at the conclusion of his moving, epic book. "Are these the last gatherers of food from the wild to be phased out? Is this the last of wild food? Is our last physical tie to untamed nature to become an obscure delicacy like the occasional pheasant?"
These words stayed with me over the years to come. But histories of environmental wrong doing have a strange way of putting traumatic events in the past, sealing off bad human behavior of former times from the unwritten pages of the present and the future. ~ Paul Greenberg

Flitch, a former tailor who, in the seventeenth century, had founded the Hobblers, a religious sect named for the peculiar shackled gait they adopted as they paced out their prayers. The Hobblers' beliefs seemed to be based largely on such novel ideas as that heaven was handily located six miles above the earth's surface, and that Nicodemus Flitch had been appointed personally by God as His mouthpiece and, as such, was licensed to curse souls to eternity, whenever he felt like it. ~ Alan Bradley

Like any good novel, it lulled him into an almost tranquil state of awareness before it jolted him - it caught him completely by surprise. ~ John Irving

In a novel, the hero can lay ten girls and marry a virgin for the finish. In a movie, that is not allowed. The villain can lay anybody he wants, have as much fun and as he wants cheating, stealing, getting rich, and whipping servants. But you have to shoot him in the end. ~ Herman J. Mankiewicz

In the end, like so many beautiful promises in our lives, that dinner date never came to be. ~ Haruki Murakami

Some colleagues, a tiny bit envious of his intuitions, a few priests, more acquainted with the many evils of our time, some subalterns, clerks, and his superiors too, insisted he read strange books: from which he drew all those words that mean nothing, or almost nothing, but which serve better than other to dazzle the naïve, the ignorant. ~ Carlo Emilio Gadda

Make no mistake about it, the detective-story is part of the literature of escape, and not of expression. ~ Dorothy L. Sayers

I cringe when critics say I'm a master of the popular novel. What's an unpopular novel? ~ Irwin Shaw

True love can beat any storm no matter how rough the sea is, true love sails through it ~ Janki Hemani

I've come across a novel called The Palm-Wine Drinkard, by the Nigerian writer Amos Tutuola, that is really remarkable because it is a kind of fantasy of West African mythology all told in West African English which, of course, is not the same as standard English. ~ William Golding

James Buchan's The Persian Bride combines a moving love story, a political thriller, and a history of modern Iran in a beautiful novel about the relationship of two people caught up in the Iranian revolution: John Pitt, a young man from England who arrives in Isfahan, Iran, in 1974, and seventeen-year-old Shirin, one of John's students, whose father is a general in the shah's army. ~ Nancy Pearl

Rainbow Cloud strode forward like a hunting cat with the same strength of height and broad shoulders, the same rolling gait as First Light's father. They were indeed the same man, split in two at birth, so the family might be rewarded by twice the skill in hunting each brother possessed. ~ P.J. Parker

In the end, Astrid couldn't do anything about my . . . turning into light, but she made a prediction. She said the sun would help me and I would be cured thanks to its efforts.'
'The sun?'
'Yes. It was the symbol I drew from among the runes. Astrid says it represents . . .'
'What?' he said, looking at me curiously, and I could see that he really wanted to hear the answer.
I became embarrassed.
'It's not important . . .' I muttered.
'Please tell me!' He turned fully towards me and I could feel myself blushing pink.
'The . . . man in my life.'
I was done for. My heart was beating heavily but Elijah, for the first time since I had awoken, smiled. I was incredibly ashamed of myself, so I made to go back to the house, but the Dark Angel grabbed my wrist. ~ A.O. Esther

Couldn't I try...Naturally, it wouldn't be a question of a tune...But couldn't I in another medium?...It would have to be a book: I don't know how to do anything else. But not a history book: history talks about what has existed - an existent can never justify the existence of another existent. My mistake was to try to resuscitate Monsieur de Rollebon. Another kind of book. I don't quite know which kind - but you would have to guess, behind the printed words, behind the pages, something which didn't exist, which was above existence. The sort of story, for example, which could never happen, an adventure. It would have to be beautiful and hard as steel and make people ashamed of their existence.

I am going, I feel irresolute. I dare not make a decision. If I were sure that I had talent...but I have never, never written anything of that sort; historical articles, yes - if you could call them that. A book. A novel. And there would be people who would read this novel and who would say: 'It was Antoine Roquentin who wrote it, he was a red-headed fellow who hung about in cafés', and they would think that about my life as I think about the life of the Negress: as about something precious and almost legendary. A book. Naturally, at first it would only be a tedious, tiring job, it wouldn't prevent me from existing or from feeling that I exist. But a time would have to come when the book would be written, would be behind me, and I think that a little of its light would fall o ~ Jean-Paul Sartre

you are out of the field of the novel ~ Anthony Burgess

Worker bees can leave.
Even drones can fly away.
The Queen is their slave. ~ Chuck Palahniuk

Isn't that how all romantics are, give love a chance? That was the sole basis of every romance novel out there; give love a chance. ~ Meghan Quinn

I still remembered the heat of his tongue and soft-wet press of his mouth. Or maybe I didn't. Maybe I'd relived it so often, I'd fabricated every glorious detail. ~ Kelly Siskind

It's only in bad novels that people are divided into two camps and have nothing to do with each other. In real life everything gets mixed up! Don't you think you'd have to be a hopeless nonentity to play only one role all your life, to have only one place in society, always to stand for the same thing?
Ah, there you are!
- Larissa Fyodorovna in Doctor Zhivago. ~ Boris Pasternak

I've never felt powerful enough to write a true political novel, or deeply knowledgeable enough to draw a character like, say, Tolstoy's Prince Kutuzov. ~ Mona Simpson

Sometimes, too, she told him of what she had read, such as a passage in a novel, of a new play, or an anecdote of the "upper ten" that she had seen in a feuilleton; for, after all, Charles was something, an ever-open ear, and ever-ready approbation. She confided many a thing to her greyhound. She would have done so to the logs in the fireplace or to the pendulum of the clock. ~ Gustave Flaubert

The characters you refer to as predatory and unsavory are useful. They're the ones who make a novel into a thriller. They're active, and most of the common virtues, the signs of a good person, are not. ~ Thomas Perry

A poet can survive everything but a misprint. ~ Oscar Wilde

Someone has to warn you."
"That's novel. A stalker warning his victim. ~ Anna Durand

No matter how ephemeral it is, a novel is something, while despair is nothing. ~ Mario Vargas-Llosa

I read old novels. The reason is simple: I prefer proper endings. Marriages and deaths, noble sacrifices and miraculous restorations, tragic separations and unhoped-for reunions, great falls and dreams fulfilled; these, in my view, constitute an ending worth the wait. They should come after adventures, perils, dangers and dilemmas, and wind everything up nice and neatly. Endings like this are to be found more commonly in old novels than new ones, so I read old novels. ~ Diane Setterfield

The last vestiges of consciousness tell her she has just witnessed her own murder, all she ever was and hoped to be is gone. ~ Terry Hayes

Writing a long novel is like survival training. Physical strength is as necessary as artistic sensitivity. ~ Mohsin Hamid

I move between the two: I write an adult novel, and then I write a children's book. I quite enjoy that. It's a nice change of pace each time. ~ John Boyne

I carry my unwritten poems in cipher on my face! ~ George Eliot

In hindsight, I see it was my decision not to let go. I didn't know how, though some days I focused completely on it: using therapy, distraction, exercise. Other days I left myself wildly grieve. Finn affects it all: every conversation I have, what I choose to wear, what books I read, what films and shows I watch. There's that Buddhist quote, (S)he who angers you owns you. She owned me. I allowed it. She controlled me. I knew this feeling of misery would pass, that what I needed was time, but I was impatient. Unfortunately, we must live through the present to get to the future, writes Hanif Kureishi in his novel Intimacy. ~ Chloe Caldwell

The Apple Pie Hubbub was a significant novel for me, because that's when I first started using verbs. ~ Steve Martin

By asking a novel question that you don't know the answer to, you discover whether you can formulate a way of finding the answer, and you stretch your own mind, and very often you learn something new. ~ Walter Gilbert

Through style, the creative effort reconstructs the world, and always with the same slight
distortion that is the mark of both art and protest. Whether it is the enlargement of the microscope which
Proust brings to bear on human experience or, on the contrary, the absurd insignificance with which the
American novel endows its characters, reality is in some way artificial. The creative force, the fecundity
of rebellion, are contained in this distortion which the style and tone of a work represent. Art is an
impossible demand given expression and form. When the most agonizing protest finds its most resolute
form of expression, rebellion satisfies its real aspirations and derives creative energy from this fidelity to
itself. Despite the fact that this runs counter to the prejudices of the times, the greatest style in art is the
expression of the most passionate rebellion. Just as genuine classicism is only romanticism subdued,
genius is a rebellion that has created its own limits. That is why there is no genius, contrary to what we
are taught today, in negation and pure despair. ~ Albert Camus

Through their capacity to manipulate symbols and to engage in reflective thought, people can generate novel ideas and innovative actions that transcend their past experiences ~ Albert Bandura

I didn't know anything about Opus Die except from pop culture, like Dan Brown novels, which I knew wasn't really knowing anything about Opus Die. ~ Wes Bentley

Father has taught me that when something is lost, whether dear or not, giving up the search is sometimes best and often enough the lost article finds its owner. ~ Cassandra Krivy Hirsch

Glenda Adams has written a wicked and witty novel. ~ Diane Johnson

Clearly she knew that between book lovers, a novel is not a novel is not a novel. It's a symbol, an offering
and sometimes a test ~ Sara Nelson

The novel comes from a long shamanic tradition wherein the shaman-storyteller himself is transformed, no longer storyteller but a character, an animal, a god, a goddess, or a natural force that is not his everyday identity. And these moments, when the characters come alive and the author disappears, take us into another world. ~ Hal Zina Bennett

The great European novel started out as entertainment, and every true novelist is nostalgic for it. In fact, the themes of those great entertainments are terribly serious-think of Cervantes! ~ Milan Kundera

I wouldn't mind my book being called an African novel if it didn't invite lazy readings. ~ Taiye Selasi

when you spend
all your time
imagining yourself
in other people's shoes,

your own story
goes unwritten,

& there is nothing
more painful
than that. ~ Amanda Lovelace