Writing A Novel Quotes

“Whatever one may say, writing a novel is a very different thing from living one. All the same our lives are not wholly separated from our works. All the scenes that I have narrated here, I have lived through. How then can they be of less value in real life than in a book? The answer to that question is that while I was living them, I was doing so consciously, deliberately: I saw them as productive of pleasure or fear, of vanity or of malice. Their true, their inner essence escaped me. It would have escaped me just the same, no matter how hard I stared at them.”
― Marcel Proust, Jean Santeuil

“If Laura was so prolific with poems, and in truth she was, then what was the problem with Megan’s request? Couldn’t Laura, with a little doing, keep stringing together line after line of words and construct, in time, a novel? It seemed logical, but there was the matter of finding an idea and sustaining it. Only fire could do that. The fire of rebellion.

Mario Vargas Llosa had not used the term “fire” exactly, but rather had discussed the presence of “seditious roots” that could “dynamite the world” the writer inhabited. He claimed that writing stories was an exercise in freedom and quarreling—out-and-out rebellion, whether or not the writer was conscious of it. And this rebellion, Vargas Llosa reminded his readers, was why the Spanish Inquisition had strictly censored works of fiction, prohibiting them for three hundred years in the American colonies.”
― L.L. Barkat, The Novelist

“A novel, should it survive, protects what a missile can't.”
― Alexander Chee, How to Write an Autobiographical Novel