Ya Novel Quotes

If valleys are the dimples on the face of the earth, as Steven King once said, then Silicon Valley is the deepest, most sparkling dimple of them all. ~ Betty Dravis

Mom made me say it over and over, Keep it hidden, keep it safe. If anyone truly knew everything, it would freak them out in a large way. It freaks the shit out of me too, so I get it. I have no clue how I know this stuff, I just do. Like how I know the orders of angels and demons, or can tell on sight if an apparition is a ghost or a time slip, or if someone's a virgin, or if they've ever killed anyone.
Why can't I just know how to play Xbox or baseball?
It's like I fell from the fucking sky. ~ Rachel A. Marks

My first YA novel, not many people have read. It's a fickle business. There's a degree of timing and luck involved. ~ Gayle Forman

The Fourth Crown Princess of the blue Cresent Islands had sixteen rituals to observe from the moment of waking to when she broke her fast. ~ Julia Golding

I was never a cool person; in fact, cool people have always made fun of me. That's why I loved [the Robert Cormier YA novel] The Chocolate War - because the cool kids (not the establishment) were the villains. I totally identified with that. ~ Simon Rich

Change your mind and change your whole life experience. ~ C.G. Rousing

It's like people don't only look good when they look like a magazine. People can be aesthetically beautiful in the way sunsets and leaves and things are. ~ Laura Tims

For me, a good YA novel is the best kind of comfort food. ~ Hallie Ephron

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

Any boy who would quote a romantic line from a bestselling YA novel had me, heart and soul. ~ Isabel Bandeira

I tell ya, if I hadn't chosen the career of being a performer, I think linguistics would have been a natural area that I'd have loved - to teach it, probably, Language has always fascinated me. There's a genetic inheritance there a good language gene, which I inherited [from my mother and grandfather] and she fostered that in me as he fostered that in her. ~ George Carlin

Love is the only thing in this universe worth risking all for. ~ Colleen Houck

Well, people have been wondering what's going to happen to the novel for two hundred years; its death has been announced many times. You know, I think the novel keeps redefining the world we live in. What you should look for in a novel is a window nobody else is looking out of, that nobody else can look through. What you look for is a voice. You pick up a novel by someone such as Faulkner or Hemingway and you just read three pages and you know who wrote it. And that's what one should demand of a novelist. ~ Mordecai Richler

So? I know lots of beautiful women. Nova wanted to chase ... I merely obliged her by running. ~ D.D. Chant

She had always been an unashamed reader of novels ... ~ Barbara Pym

Shut the front door!" Jenna exclaimed.
Andrew disappeared into the foyer, and when he returned, his eyebrows were furrowed in confusion. "The door is shut? ~ Laura Kreitzer

A novel rough draft is like bread dough; you need to beat the crap out of it for it to rise. ~ Chris Baty

A book is sent out into the world, and there is no way of fully anticipating the responses it will elicit. Consider the responses called forth by the Bible, Homer, Shakespeare - let alone contemporary poetry or a modern novel. ~ Chaim Potok

How astonishingly intimate the business of fiction is, more intimate than anything that issues from the psychiatrist's couch or even the lovers' bed. You see the soul, pinned and wriggling on the wall. ~ Martin Amis

They're like a favourite novel- after you've read it once you know the story, but you still need to know it's nearby just in case you need to read it again. ~ Alice Broadway

I was desperately shy when I was wee. Totally lacked confidence socially. When I look back at school photographs, I'm always the one shrinking in the back. What I really wanted to do was become a writer, and I don't think the residue of that has ever gone away. I still feel the ultimate achievement would be to write a novel. ~ Anne-Marie Duff

Just as creativity enables us to envision novel solutions to tough problems, it can also enable us to develop original paths around rules, all the while allowing us to reinterpret information in a self-serving way. Putting our creative minds to work can help us come up with a narrative that lets us have our cake and eat it too, and create stories in which we're always the hero, never the villain. If the key to our dishonesty is our ability to think of ourselves as honest and moral people while at the same time benefitting from cheating, creativity can help us tell better stories - stories that allow us to be even more dishonest but still think of ourselves as wonderfully honest people. ~ Dan Ariely

I'd rather be lucky than good.' [Baseball player] Lefty Gomez said that, and I live and breathe that fortune-dwelling, fuzzy-dice-dangling creed. I was fantastically lucky to be taken in by Montag Press and its extraordinary managing editor, Charlie Franco. But I'm also a bit of a research freak and I'm convinced that homework helped me set up a situation where luck could flash and ignite. I spent an inordinate amount of time researching small and independent imprints. Here I reveal the flip side of thinking that any hours spent researching literary agents is wasted (in my unwashed opinion) while time spent reading and learning about quality independent publishers is essential. It's the best and only way to identify the little houses in that vibrant village that might be just right for your own book. (Interview with Ruuf Wangersen on sevencircumstances.com) ~ Ruuf Wangersen

In general, [ ... ] novel-theorists have nothing very urgent or interesting to say about literature. Why then do they write when they have nothing to say? Because the ambitious teacher can only rise in the academic bureaucracy by writing at complicated length about writing that has already been much written about. The result of all this book-chat cannot interest anyone who knows literature while those who would like to learn something about books can only be mystified and discouraged by these commentaries. ~ Gore Vidal

His fierce appreciation of female beauty, the unrelenting desire he felt for their company, the pleasure he both derived and sought to give, had led him in and out of quite a few bedroom doors. ~ Roy L. Pickering Jr.

The rhythm of fraught footsteps and fervent heartbeat orchestrated a symphony of anticipation and dread. ~ Brian A. McBride

One of the things he liked about playwriting as to any other kind of writing is that a playwright is a w-r-i-g-h-t, not a w-r-i-t-e; in other words, that a playwright is more of a craftsman than an artist of the big novel. ~ Simon McBurney

As a writer I have persisted in my uncertainty, alternating between novels which could charitably be considered literature and world reporting which by another stretch of objective standards might be called history. ~ James A. Michener

Looking back on my life, I sigh. The caprice of youth goes with the wind, I've no regrets. ~ Roman Payne

Writing one page a day equals a 365 page novel in a year. ~ Kimberlee R. Mendoza

It was 1981. I was working on a novel. And I put that novel aside one day after I read a newspaper article. The story said there were 19 women still on the pension payroll who were Confederate war widows. They were women who very early in their lives had married very old men. ~ Allan Gurganus

Do you know what it's like, to hide in the shadows until your soul starts to blend into the darkness? ~ Maverick Myth Novel

Note to self: don't throw things at girls. ~ Emlyn Chand

I will not adopt that ungenerous and impolitic custom so common with novel writers, of degrading by their contemptuous censure the very performances, to the number of which they are themselves adding?joining with their greatest enemies in bestowing the harshest epithets on such works, and scarcely ever permitting them to be read by their own heroine, who, if she accidentally take up a novel, is sure to turn over its insipid leaves with disgust. ~ Jane Austen

My grandma always had chocolate-covered cherries," D said, his tone curled at the edges, like he'd surprised himself with the memory. Jack slid up a little so he could watch D's face. "Usedta love them things. The way they'd kinda burst open when ya bit 'em, and that syrupy stuff inside, then the cherry. I'd bite off one side a the shell real careful-like, so none a the syrup spilled, then suck all the gooey out, then fish out the cherry with my tongue, then I'd just have the chocolate shell left and I'd nibble on it 'til it was gone. She'd only let me have one or two so I hadta make 'em last." He glanced at Jack, who was just staring at him, his mouth open. "What?"
"That is the sexiest thing I've ever heard."
D flushed and fidgeted. "Aw, hell."
"Seriously. Ask me how much I want to go get some chocolate-covered cherries right now just so I can watch you eat them. ~ Jane Seville

Holy hell, Trev! What kind of move was that?"
Trevor leaned over her with a big smile on his face. "You really thought I would give up that easy? I am a geek, Cassie, not a friggin' wimp. It's called the internet and how to videos. ~ Cecilia Aubrey & Chris Almeida

In pain and loss, we can find either meaning, or hopelessness. The choice is ours.
How we see things, how we interpret them, how we emotionally react;
these call more of the same into our lives.
We build a world for ourselves out of what we believe.
And how we choose to respond.
Whether we let it take us under,
or rise to meet it.
- From "The Soul Hides in Shadows", a novel by Edward Fahey ~ Edward Fahey

Before you can write a novel you have to have a number of ideas that come together. One idea is not enough. ~ Joyce Carol Oates

Get your sticky fingers away from my cookies," Ben ordered, without turning his head, to see Jaxton trying to steal one from the cooking tray.
"You weren't saying that last night," Jaxton retaliated, coming up to Ben's side, to give him a nudge. They were both smiling, while looking down at the counter, where Ben was making his delicious rosemary cookies. "In fact, I seem to remember you grabbing my sticky fingers and putting them in your mouth," he teased, speaking quietly, so that Lyon wouldn't hear them at the other side of the room.
Ben turned to Jaxton and abandoned his baking, to catch his face in flour covered hands and plant a deep kiss on his lips.
Jaxton opened his mouth, in acceptance of his kiss.

~ From the Heart ~ Elaine White

If I'm hanging around too much, my wife and kids say, 'Hey, why don't you go downstairs and start a new novel?' ~ Nick Cave

Star gazing in a hammock? That sounds like a bad romance novel cliche! ~ Katie Ashley

This is m-me." I indicated the lonely track.

"Really? What's up there?" He peered over my shoulder in genuine curiosity. "Is there a house up there? You're not a sylph or something that really does live wild, are you? ~ J.A. Ironside

But re-reading Voss also demonstrates again that although White wasn't 'a nice man', and indeed was - perhaps rightly - scathingly dismissive of my and other Australian writers' work and origins unless they were his friends, he was a genius, and Voss one of the finest works of the modernist era and of the past century. ~ Thomas Keneally

When you write a movie, you have a hundred collaborators. But when you write a novel, it's yours. ~ Sidney Sheldon

I was an avid reader, but never thought seriously about writing a novel until I was in my thirties. I took no formal fiction-writing courses and never thought about these categories when I wrote my first novel. ~ M.J. Rose

Ya gotta live somewhere, but also you GET to live somewhere. ~ John Green