Novel Idea Quotes

I might just write a novel next. I don't know!

The idea for a novel is like a little tiny fire in a dark night. And, one by one, the characters come and stand around it and warm their hands.

When my mother talked about her brother, there was this light in her eyes. I thought, 'This is the basis of a novel.'

I got the idea for my novel 'Lord of Light' when I cut myself shaving just before I was to go on a panel at a convention. I had to go out there with this big gash in my face. I remember that I thought, 'I wish I could change bodies.'

I don't base my books on my life (thank goodness) and I don't pick the topic first. In fact, the topic picks me - via a question I can't answer as a mom, a wife, a woman, an American. I find myself wondering "What if..." and it blossoms into a whole novel.

An idea you have might not be original. But by creating a novel out of that idea you can make it original.

I don't know exactly where the ideas come from. One day, a sentence just popped into my head - 'There was going to be trouble, and, hell, he just wasn't in the mood for it' - and I knew I had a novel.

I went and looked at one of these great cathedrals one day, and I was blown away by it. From there I became interested in how cathedrals were built, and from there I became interested in the society that built the medieval cathedral. It occurred to me at some point that the story of the building of a cathedral could be a great popular novel.

'Another Brooklyn' came to me in this kind of dreamlike series of vignettes.

'Paycheck,' I thought, was a really, really good idea. I never got an opportunity, unfortunately, to read the novel, but I loved the idea of how to deal with intellectual properties. I just don't know that we necessarily got to the heart of that particular idea. I think it became more of a chase movie than anything else.

May I say that I approve of a piece that tries to remake the entire puzzle?

Stop repeating what never worked in the first place. Stand back and ask for a new solution.

Here was a fragment of Goddess myth that, through all its permutations, had somehow escaped being turned on its head. It was the perfect springboard for the sort of novel I wanted to write.

I'd been writing fiction for 50 years, since I was 19. And when you write fiction, it becomes a way of thinking: there's always a novel around. The strange thing was that after 'Remember Me,' there wasn't.

Writing a book is something I actually feel like I could do. I don't know when that would happen, but I feel like if the right idea strikes, whether it be short stories or a novel or even a memoir that would be more substantial than most of the comedian memoirs people put out where it's big font and all the chapters are like ten pages long.

I remember going to see 'Starlight Express' almost every birthday I had as a treat because I just loved it, and the idea that you could rollerskate in a sort of scary old theatre... It was sort of a novel concept.

I always wanted to use my newspaper background in a novel.

The best reaction to a paradox is to invent a genuinely new and deep idea.

I would like to one day write a nice big novel and enjoy writing it and people enjoy reading it but I cannae be bothered or I don't have any ideas that would fill up a big book like that.

You should spend more time with your families; write that novel you've always wanted to write. You know, the one about the fearless reporter who stands up to the administration. You know - fiction.

I actually really wish I had written 'The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying' as an unreliably narrated novel that is also a self-help book.

In the summer of 2010, I was working on a version of 'True Detective' that I was thinking might be my next novel, and it was told in these two first-person voices; Cohle and Hart's voices.

What a good thing Adam had. When he said a good thing he knew nobody had said it before.

I wanted to write a big novel, something epic in scale.

I do want to go another way - to write something completely different.