A Quote by James Thayer

I've never discovered the idea for my next novel while I was still working on the current novel. Other writers don't suffer this.

James Thayer

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Current Discovered Idea Never Next Novel Other Still Suffer While Working Writers

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James Thayer
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Born: May 25, 1949

I have never started a novel - I mean except the first, when I was starting a novel just to start a novel - I've never written one without rereading Victory. It opens up the possibilities of a novel. It makes it seem worth doing.

Joan Didion

I'm working on a young adult novel. I've been working on it for a while, because I don't know how to write a novel and I'm teaching myself. For that reason, I've been reading a lot of YA [young adults], which I never have before. It's totally new to me.

Morgan Parker

The DNA of the novel - which, if I begin to write nonfiction, I will write about this - is that: the title of the novel is the whole novel. The first line of the novel is the whole novel. The point of view is the whole novel. Every subplot is the whole novel. The verb tense is the whole novel.

Mary Kay Zuravleff

Objectifying your own novel while writing it never really helps. Instead, I guess while you're writing you need to think: This is the novel I want to write. And when you're done you need to think: This is what the novel I wanted to write feels like and reads like and looks like. Other people might call it sweeping or small, but it's the book you chose.

Meg Wolitzer

For my part, the good novel of character is the novel I can always pick up; but the good novel of incident is the novel I can never lay down.

Agnes Repplier

Once I had started, I discovered the secret pleasure of writing a novel. It's such an immersive, deep commitment. With short stories, you're continually having to start again from scratch, but with a novel you only need one good idea every few years.

Debra Dean

I never know when I finish the novel I am writing which will be the next novel out of the station.

John Irving

I always wanted to write. While I was on a long surf trip, supporting myself with various day jobs, I was working hard on a novel. My third novel, in fact.

William Finnegan

Working on the plot/story idea for my next novel ... It always takes time.

Nicholas Sparks

But to be perfectly frank, this childish idea that the author of a novel has some special insight into the characters in the novel ... it's ridiculous. That novel was composed of scratches on a page, dear. The characters inhabiting it have no life outside of those scratches. What happened to them? They all ceased to exist the moment the novel ended.

John Green

When I start getting close to the end of a novel, something registers in the back of my mind for the next novel, so that I usually don't write, or take notes. And I certainly don't begin. I just allow things to percolate for a while.

Richard Russo

It's very bad to write a novel by act of will. I can do a book of nonfiction work that way - just sign the contract and do the book because, provided the topic has some meaning for me, I know I can do it. But a novel is different. A novel is more like falling in love. You don't say, 'I'm going to fall in love next Tuesday, I'm going to begin my novel.' The novel has to come to you. It has to feel just like love.

Norman Mailer

For a Jewish Puritan of the middle class, the novel is serious, the novel is work, the novel is conscientious application why, the novel is practically the retail business all over again.

Howard Nemerov

You can't have a novel without real, believable people, and once you get into either too theoretical a novel or too philosophical a novel, you get into the dangers that the French novel has discovered in the past 50 or 60 years. And you get into a sort of aridity. No, you have to have real, identifiable people to whom the reader reacts in a way as if they were real people.

Julian Barnes

In this astonishing novel Amirrezvani reminds us what all human hearts suffer and dare. Equal of the Sun is an irresistible novel.

Jonis Agee

I'm skeptical that the novel will be "reinvented." If you start thinking about a medical textbook or something, then, yes, I think that's ripe for reinvention. You can imagine animations of a beating heart. But I think the novel will thrive in its current form. That doesn't mean that there won't be new narrative inventions as well. But I don't think they'll displace the novel.

Jeff Bezos

A Quote by James Thayer

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