Novel Success Quotes

Well, for people who want to write best sellers, the best advice I can give is to say that the novel has to engage the reader emotionally.

I was elated when I found out my first novel, 'Leaving Patrick,' about a woman who walks out on her husband, was going to be published.

My first book was the most successful debut novel in the U.K. ever and every one of my books has reached number one in the U.K. Clearly the British know brilliance when they see it.

Writing a novel that works is an extremely difficult thing to do. It requires a level of skill and dedication that always surprises me.

Debut novels are difficult because nobody knows you... they just don't find a huge audience, because that's how the market works.

When people write a novel, they want to have that reach and that impact. To get it with a first novel, you can either see it as an albatross or a calling card.

My first job was to run a concessions cart. Later, I found a position at the Pacific Film Archive. Thus began a long series of jobs, each one slightly better than the last, that continued for a decade, until I sold my first novel, and still goes on, even now.

There are 2,000 young-adult novels published a year, and hardly any of them ever break out.

Only one novel is a novel: that is a successful novel.

Once I finished 'Eileen,' I wanted to write more novels. I don't see myself stopping any time soon.

I started writing 'The Lobster Kings' the day after I sold my first novel, 'Touch.'

If I end up having a novel that sells really well and that allows me to pay for health insurance and mortgage without having to work at a day job, that would be great.

I finished my first novel - it was around 300 pages long - when I was 16. Wrote one more before I got out of high school, then wrote the first Lincoln Perry novel when I was 19. It didn't sell, but I liked the character and I knew the world so I tried what was, in my mind, a sequel. Wrote that when I was 20, and that one made it.

Most novels, if they are successful at all, are original in the sense that they report the existence of an area of society, a type of person, not yet admitted to the general literate consciousness.

The Portrait of a Lady is entirely successful in giving one the sense of having met somebody far too radiantly good for this world.

It is admitted that a novel can hardly be made interesting or successful without love? It is necessary because the passion is one which interests or has interested all. Everyone feels it, has felt it, or expects to feel it.

Many readers know my work first through 'Housekeeping,' simply because it was my only novel for a pretty long time.

Before my book, 'California,' came out, I had modest hopes for it. Or, let's put it this way - I had the same hopes that every literary fiction writer in America has: I wanted the novel to be well-received, critically. As for sales? I didn't want it to disappoint, but I didn't expect it to be a best-seller, either.

I think comedy is so much easier to do on the page than it is in real life. When I'm writing, comedy is an easy way to win over the reader. You're automatically more disposed to keep reading, thinking maybe, "I'll get another laugh or two." I think it's a survival instinct in me. I mean, you don't want to lose these guys within five or ten pages. You want them to keep going. I think to some extent it's a desperate measure that I throw out there, because a novel isn't a complete waste of time if it made you laugh.

My self-publishing adventure led to my work being picked up by a traditional publisher and eventually hitting the bestseller lists. That led to two more bestselling novels.

If one book's done this well, you want to write another one that does just as well. There's that horror of the second novel that doesn't match up.

My first novel was a critical success in a matter of weeks.

Most gothics are overplotted novels whose success or failure hinges on the author's ability to make you believe in the characters and partake of the mood.

'Out' was my real breakthrough, the novel that became a hit in Japan and sold a lot of books, so it was sort of an obvious choice for being the first book to be translated into English.

They say great themes make great novels