Quotes about novel
page 2

“We don't read novels to have an experience like life. Heck, we're living lives, complete with all the incompleteness. We turn to fiction to have an author assure us that it means something.”

Orson Scott Card (1951) American science fiction novelist

Life, Reading

“Simon’s love life was complicated, but there was a pang, just for a moment, for this woman talking graphic novels with him.
Ah, well. Tessa Gray, foxy nerd, was probably dating someone already.”

Cassandra Clare (1973) American author

Source: The Whitechapel Fiend

Love, Life

“I dedicate this novel to Gala, who was constantly by my side while I was writing it, who was the good fairy of my equilibrium, who banished the salamanders of my doubts and strengthened the lions of certainties…”

Salvador Dalí (1904–1989) Spanish artist

Source: Hidden Faces

“Ladies know what to guard against, because they read novels that tell them of these tricks…”

Thomas Hardy (1840–1928) English novelist and poet

Source: Tess of the D'Urbervilles

Reading

“These are all novels, all about people that never existed, the people that read them it makes them unhappy with their own lives. Makes them want to live in other ways they can never really be.”

Ray Bradbury book Fahrenheit 451

Source: Fahrenheit 451

People, Way, Reading

“Reading a good long novel is in many ways like having a long and satisfying affair”

Stephen King (1947) American author

Way, Reading

“This story is not and never was meant to challenge anyone's faith; however, if one's faith can be shaken by stories in a humorous novel, one may have a bit more praying to do.”

Christopher Moore book Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ's Childhood Pal

Source: Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ's Childhood Pal

Faith

“The first sentence of every novel should be: Trust me, this will take time but there is order here, very faint, very human.”

Michael Ondaatje book In the Skin of a Lion

Source: In the Skin of a Lion

Time

“Whenever I start a novel, I'm always looking for two things: a bit of science that makes me go 'what if?' and a piece of history that ends in a question mark.”

James Rollins (1961) American writer

History, Question, Science

“He wanted to appear suddenly to her in novel and heroic colors. He wanted to stir her from that casualness she showed toward everything except herself.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald book The Beautiful and Damned

Source: The Beautiful and Damned

Color, Appearance

“Life is a shitstorm, in which art is our only umbrella."
(spoken by character in a novel by Mario Vargas Llosa)”

Mario Vargas Llosa (1936) Peruvian writer, politician, journalist, and essayist

Life, Art

“I had read a Tale of Two Cities and found it up to my standards as a romantic novel. She opened the first page and I heard poetry for the first time in my life… her voice slid in and curved down trough and over the words. She was nearly singing.”

Maya Angelou book I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings

Source: I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings

Life, Singing, Time, Reading

“You can't really succeed with a novel anyway; they're too big. It's like city planning. You can't plan a perfect city because there's too much going on that you can't take into account. You can, however, write a perfect sentence now and then. I have.”

Gore Vidal (1925–2012) American writer

Perfection

“Compared to a novel, a film is like an economy pizza where there are no olives, no ham, no anchovies, no mushrooms, and all you’ve got is the dough.”

Louis De Bernières (1954) English novelist

“How I wish I lived in a Jane Austen novel!”

Dodie Smith book I Capture the Castle

Source: I Capture the Castle

“Maybe there is no better novel in the world than Denton Welch's In Youth Is Pleasure. Just holding it in my hands, so precious, so beyond gay, so deliciously subversive, is enough to make illiteracy a worse social crime than hunger.”

John Waters (1946) American filmmaker, actor, comedian and writer

Source: Role Models

Hunger, Pleasure, Youth, World

“I decided I would put off the novel until I had gone to Europe and had a lover, and that I would never learn a word of shorthand. If I never learned shorthand I would never have to use it.”

Sylvia Plath book The Bell Jar

Source: The Bell Jar

Lovers, Learning

“Secrets. Need to disguise. The novel was born of this.”

Anaïs Nin book Delta of Venus

Source: Delta of Venus

Secret

“I loved him, but love isn't enough. All the fairy tales, the romance novels, the soap operas; they're all lies. Love does not conquer all.”

Laurell K. Hamilton book The Lunatic Cafe

Source: The Lunatic Cafe

Love

“I'll write to you. A super-long letter, like in an old-fashioned novel”

Haruki Murakami book After Dark

Source: After Dark

Fashion

“I cringe when critics say I'm a master of the popular novel. What's an unpopular novel?”

Irwin Shaw (1913–1984) American politician

“[A] novel is not moral in the usual sense of the word. It can be called moral when it shakes us out of our stupor and makes us confront the absolutes we believe in.”

Azar Nafisi book Reading Lolita in Tehran

Source: Reading Lolita in Tehran

Sense

“She had always been an unashamed reader of novels.”

Barbara Pym book Quartet in Autumn

Source: Quartet in Autumn

“There is not one big cosmic meaning for all; there is only the meaning we each give to our life, an individual meaning, an individual plot, like an individual novel, a book for each person.”

Anaïs Nin (1903–1977) writer of novels, short stories, and erotica

Source: The Diary of Anaïs Nin, Vol. 1: 1931-1934

Life, Books, Personality

“But at the best of times she feels like a character in a Muriel Spark novel — independent, bookish, sharp-minded, secretly romantic.”

David Nicholls book One Day

Source: One Day

Feeling, Time

“Believe me, when I say;
There are no two powers
That command the soul.
One is God
The other is the tide.
-Anon
From the novel Abarat”

Clive Barker book Abarat

Source: Abarat

God, Soul

“The person, be it gentleman or lady, who has not pleasure in a good novel must be intolerably stupid”

Jane Austen book Northanger Abbey

Variant: The person, be it gentleman or lady, who has not pleasure in a good novel must be intolerably stupid
Source: "Northanger Abbey" (1817)

Pleasure, Stupidity, Personality

“Why didn’t you tell me there was danger? Why didn’t you warn me? Ladies know what to guard against, because they read novels that tell them of these tricks; but I never had the chance of discovering in that way; and you did not help me!”

Thomas Hardy (1840–1928) English novelist and poet

Source: Tess of the D'Urbervilles

Way, Chance, Reading, Help

“Since I became a novelist I have discovered that I am biased. Either I think a new novel is worse than mine and I don’t like it, or I suspect it is better than my novels and I don’t like it.”

Umberto Eco (1932–2016) Italian semiotician, essayist, philosopher, literary critic, and novelist

Thinking

“To write a novel, you begin with what you can see and then you add what came before and what came after.

… You must understand that when you are writing a novel you are not making anything up. It's all there and you just have to find it.”

Thomas Harris Red Dragon

Source: Red Dragon

Understanding

“I have met with women whom I really think would like to be married to a Poem and to be given away by a Novel.”

John Keats (1795–1821) English Romantic poet

Women, Thinking

“I'd much prefer my books to shoes… In the summer I sometimes take walks without shoes but never without a novel.”

Nathan Englander (1970) American short story writer and novelist

Books, Shoe, Summer

“I wrote my first novel because I wanted to read it.”

Toni Morrison (1931–2019) American writer

Reading

“This is why I read novels: so I can escape my own unrelenting monologue.”

Carol Shields Unless

Source: Unless

Reading

“Every few weeks she would shut herself up in her room, put on her scribbling suit, and fall into a vortex, as she expressed it, writing away at her novel with all her heart and soul, for till that was finished she could find no peace.”

Louisa May Alcott book Little Women

Source: Little Women

Peace, Soul, Heart

“Above my cradle loomed the bookcase where/ Latin ashes and the dust of Greece/ mingled with novels, history, and verse/ in one dark Babel. I was folio-high/ when I first heard the voices.”

Charles Baudelaire (1821–1867) French poet

History

“All novels… are concerned with the enigma of the self. As soon as you create an imaginary being, a character, you are automatically confronted by the question: what is the self? How can it be grasped?”

Milan Kundera (1929–2023) Czech author of Czech and French literature

Source: The Art of the Novel

Question

“They say great themes make great novels.. but what these young writers don't understand is that there is no greater theme than men and women.”

John O'Hara (1905–1970) American journalist

Women, Men, Understanding

“Most people are much better at saying things in letters than in conversation, and some people can write artistic, inventive letters, but when they try a poem or story or novel they become pretentious.”

Charles Bukowski book Women

Source: Women

People

“Then I decided I would spend the summer writing a novel.

That would fix a lot of people.”

Sylvia Plath book The Bell Jar

Source: The Bell Jar

People, Summer

“If I were a writer, how I would enjoy being told the novel is dead. How liberating to work in the margins, outside a central perception. You are the ghoul of literature. Lovely.”

Don DeLillo book The Names

Source: The Names (1982), Ch. 4

Love, Literature, Dead

“[Harry] had always suffered from a vague restlessness, a longing for adventure that she told herself severely was the result of reading too many novels when she was a small child.”

Robin McKinley book The Blue Sword

Source: The Blue Sword

Suffering, Reading

“Sex must be mixed with tears, laughter, words, promises, scenes, jealousy, envy, all the spices of fear, foreign travel, new faces, novels, stories, dreams, fantasies, music, dancing, opium, wine.”

Anaïs Nin (1903–1977) writer of novels, short stories, and erotica

Source: The Diary of Anaïs Nin, Vol. 1: 1931-1934

Fear, Jealousy, Dreams, Music

“I am going to marry my novels and have little short stories for children.”

Jack Kerouac (1922–1969) American writer

Kerouac, as quoted by Allen Ginsberg in The Book of Martyrdom and Artifice (2006), page 250.

Children

“All novels are sequels; influence is bliss.”

Michael Chabon (1963) Novelist, short story writer, essayist

“Life isn't a romance novel. The truth is, the reason romance novels sell so well ---- the reason why everyone loves them ---- is because no one's life is actually like that. Everyone WANTS their life to be like that.”

Meg Cabot (1967) Novelist

Source: Forever Princess

Love, Life, Truth

“I like shape very much. A novel has to have shape, and life doesn't have any.”

Jean Rhys (1890–1979) novelist from Dominica

Source: Smile Please: An Unfinished Autobiography

Life

“I have always held the old-fashioned opinion that the primary object of a work of fiction should be to tell a story; and I have never believed that the novelist who properly performed this first condition of his art, was in danger, on that account, of neglecting the delineation of character — for this plain reason, that the effect produced, by any narrative of events is essentially dependent, not on the events themselves, but on the human interest which is directly connected with them. It may be possible in novel-writing to present characters successfully without telling a story; but it is not possible to tell a story successfully without presenting characters: their existence, as recognizable realities, being the sole condition on which the story can be effectively told. The only narrative which can hope to lay a strong hold on the attention of readers is a narrative which interests them about men and women — for the perfectly obvious reasons that they are men and women themselves.”

Wilkie Collins book The Woman in White

Source: Collins explaining what he calls the literary principal guiding him, in the preface of the second edition of The Woman in White. Also in Reality's Dark Light: The Sensational Wilkie Collins by Maria K. Bachman & Don Richard Cox [University of Tennessee Press, 2003, ISBN 1-572-33274-3] ( p. xiv https://books.google.com/books?id=_X8AlmIp0dwC&pg=PR14)

Women, Men, Hope, Art

“Life resembles a novel more often than novels resemble life.”

George Sand book Métella

La vie ressemble plus souvent à un roman qu'un roman ne ressemble à la vie.
Metella, ch. 1 (1833); Robert J. Ackerman Perfect Daughters (Deerfield Beach, Fla.: HCI, 2002) p. 31

Life

“Readers understand that the books celebrate female power. In the romance novel, the woman always wins. With courage, intelligence and gentleness she brings the most dangerous creature on the earth, the human male, to his knees.”

Jayne Ann Krentz (1948) American novelist

Books, Intelligence, Courage, Understanding

“I write whenever it suits me. During a creative period I write every day; a novel should not be interrupted.”

Francois Mauriac (1885–1970) French author

“We can't behave like people in novels, though, can we?”

Edith Wharton The Age of Innocence

Source: The Age of Innocence

People

“Vampire? Such a provocative word, wrapped in too many clichés and girly novels.”

Matt Haig book The Radleys

Source: The Radleys

“A couple of times he called the second he'd finished reading a novel and just had to tell me about it, and I know it sounds hokey and librarianish to say so, but I just swooned when he did that.”

Sarah Vowell book Take the Cannoli

Source: Take the Cannoli

Time, Reading

“My desire for knowledge is intermittent; but my desire to bathe my head in atmospheres unknown to my feet is perennial and constant. The highest that we can attain to is not Knowledge, but Sympathy with Intelligence. I do not know that this higher knowledge amounts to anything more definite than a novel and grand surprise on a sudden revelation of the insufficiency of all that we called Knowledge before — a discovery that there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamed of in our philosophy.”

Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862) 1817-1862 American poet, essayist, naturalist, and abolitionist

Walking (June 1862)
Source: Civil Disobedience and Other Essays

Dreams, Intelligence, Knowledge

“The things that the novel does not say are necessarily more numerous than those it does say and only a special halo around what is written can give the illusion that you are reading also what is not written.”

Italo Calvino (1923–1985) Italian journalist and writer of short stories and novels

Reading

“If the heroine of one novel be not patronized by the heroine of another, from whom can she expect protection and regard?”

Jane Austen book Northanger Abbey

Source: Northanger Abbey

“Someone once wrote that a novel should deliver a series of small astonishments. I get the same thing spending an hour with you.

Also, here is a green toothbrush tied in a ribbon. It expresses my feelings inadequately.”

E. Lockhart book We Were Liars

Source: We Were Liars

Feeling

“There is a technical, literary term for those who mistake the opinions and beliefs of characters in a novel for those of the author. The term is 'idiot'.”

Larry Niven (1938) American writer

“If this were a novel, I'd stop reading right now. I'd throw it across the room.”

Gabrielle Zevin (1977) American writer

Source: The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry

Reading

“We're talking about the novel, right? But maybe we're not. We're talking about ourselves. And I guess that's what can start to happen when you talk about a book.”

Meg Wolitzer (1959) American writer

Source: Belzhar

Books

“Someone once wrote that a novel should deliver a series of small astonishments. I get the same thing spending an hour with you.”

E. Lockhart book We Were Liars

Source: We Were Liars

“The best way to write a novel is to do it behind your own back.”

China Miéville (1972) English writer

Way

“Say, you told me you thoughtwas the greatest novel ever written. I thinkis the greatest. Let's fight. - Joe Willard”

Maud Hart Lovelace book Betsy and Joe

Source: Betsy and Joe

Fight

“I don't think everyone wants to create the great American novel, but we all have a dream of telling our stories-of realizing what we think, feel, and see before we die. Writing is a path to meet ourselves and become intimate.”

Natalie Goldberg (1948) American writer

Source: Writing Down the Bones: Freeing the Writer Within

Dreams, Feeling, Thinking

“I have almost completed a long novel, but it is unpublishable until my death and England's.”

E.M. Forster (1879–1970) English novelist

Death

“If I could sum it up in 50 words, I wouldn't have needed to write a whole novel about it.”

Patrick Rothfuss (1973) American fantasy writer

“Romance novels are birthday cake and life is often peanut butter and jelly. I think everyone should have lots of delicious romance novels lying around for those times when the peanut butter of life gets stuck to the roof of your mouth.”

Janet Evanovich (1943) Novelist

Life, Lying, Birthday, Thinking

“You can make your superhero a psychopath, you can draw gut-splattering violence, and you can call it a "graphic novel," but comic books are still incredibly stupid.”

Bill Watterson (1958) American comic artist

Books, Stupidity, Drawing

“There can be no more beautiful spot to die in, no spot more worthy of total despair, than one’s own novel.”

Franz Kafka (1883–1924) author

Source: Diaries of Franz Kafka

Beauty, Despair

“Writing's funny, it's like walking down a hall in the dark looking for the light switch, and suddenly you find it, flip it on, and then you discover the hallway you passed through is papered with the novel you've written.”

Jonathan Safran Foer (1977) Novelist

Light

“Why did people ask "What is it about?" as if a novel had to be about only one thing.”

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie book Americanah

Source: Americanah (2013)

People

“Writing a novel is not merely going on a shopping expedition across the border to an unreal land: it is hours and years spent in the factories, the streets, the cathedrals of the imagination.”

Janet Frame (1924–2004) New Zealand author

Imagination

“Remember, despite the fact that this book is being sold as a 'fantasy' novel, you must take all of the things it says extremely seriously, as they are quite important, are in no way silly, and always make sense.

Rutabaga.”

Brandon Sanderson Alcatraz Versus the Evil Librarians

Source: Alcatraz Versus the Evil Librarians

Books, Way, Sense

“The hard part about writing a novel is finishing it.”

Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961) American author and journalist

Parting

“Novels, since the birth of the genre, have been full of rejected, seduced, and abandoned maidens, whose proper fate is to die…”

Margaret Drabble (1939) Novelist, biographer and critic

Source: Sense and Sensibility

Fate, Birth

“The novels that attract me most… are those that create an illusion of transperancy around a knot of human relationships as obscure, cruel and perverse as possible.”

Italo Calvino (1923–1985) Italian journalist and writer of short stories and novels

Source: If on a Winter's Night a Traveler

“You are about to begin reading Italo Calvino's new novel, If on a winter's night a traveler.”

Italo Calvino (1923–1985) Italian journalist and writer of short stories and novels

Source: If on a Winter's Night a Traveler

Travel, Winter, Reading, Night

“We are all potentially characters in a novel--with the difference that characters in a novel really get to live their lives to the full.”

Georges Simenon (1903–1989) Belgian writer

“A great novel heightens your senses and sensitivity to the complexities of life and of individuals, and prevents you from the self-righteousness that sees morality in fixed cormulas about good and evil.”

Azar Nafisi book Reading Lolita in Tehran

Source: Reading Lolita in Tehran (2003)

Life, Sense, Evil

“Entering a novel is like going on a climb in the mountains: you have to learn the rhythm of respiration, acquire the pace; otherwise you stop right away.”

Umberto Eco (1932–2016) Italian semiotician, essayist, philosopher, literary critic, and novelist

Source: Postscript to the Name of the Rose

Mountain, Learning

“Once I learned, I went online and ordered every romance novel I could find. They're fairy tales for grown-ups.”

Gena Showalter (1975) American writer

Source: The Darkest Night

Learning

“The novel is not the author's confession; it is an investigation of human life in the trap the world has become”

Milan Kundera book The Unbearable Lightness of Being

Source: The Unbearable Lightness of Being

Life, World

“I have come to understand something about novels," Tessa said.
"And what is that?"
"They are not true.”

Cassandra Clare book Clockwork Princess

Source: Clockwork Princess

Understanding

“Night is certainly more novel and less profane than day.”

Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862) 1817-1862 American poet, essayist, naturalist, and abolitionist

Night

“A narrator should not supply interpretations of his work; otherwise he would have not written a novel, which is a machine for generating interpretations.”

Umberto Eco book The Name of the Rose

Source: The Name of the Rose

“You should spend more time reading the Good Book and less reading all those novels. What are you going to tell the Lord on Judgement Day when He asks you why you didn't read your bible? Hmm?"I said. To myself.”

Jennifer Donnelly A Northern Light

Source: A Northern Light

Books, Time, Reading

“Daisy had known the novel was silly even as she had read it, but that had not detracted one bit from her enjoyment.”

Lisa Kleypas (1964) American writer

Source: Scandal in Spring

Reading

“It takes a lot of energy and a lot of neurosis to write a novel. If you were really sensible, you'd do something else.”

Lawrence Durrell (1912–1990) British novelist, poet, dramatist, and travel writer

“It is not mysterious to be home on a Saturday night, reading a novel in a pile of smelly golden retrievers.”

E. Lockhart book We Were Liars

Source: We Were Liars

Home, Reading, Night

“Novels give you the matrix of emotions, give you the flavour of a time in a way formal history cannot.”

Doris Lessing (1919–2013) British novelist, poet, playwright, librettist, biographer and short story writer

Way, History, Time

“If you can read and have more imagination than a doorknob, what need do you have for a 'movie version' of a novel?”

Wendell Berry (1934) author

Source: What Matters?: Economics for a Renewed Commonwealth

Imagination, Reading

“What do you do when Mom leaves you alone like this? (Kat)
I write romance novels. (Acheron)”

Sherrilyn Kenyon (1965) Novelist

Source: Devil May Cry

Moms

“Anyone who is going to be a writer knows enough at fifteen to write several novels.”

May Sarton (1912–1995) American poet, novelist, and memoirist

“I don't write fantasy; I write historical novels about an imaginary place.”

Raymond E. Feist (1945) Novelist

“That pompous phrase (graphic novel) was thought up by some idiot in the marketing department of DC. I prefer to call them Big Expensive Comics.”

Alan Moore (1953) English writer primarily known for his work in comic books

“A novel is an impression, not an argument.”

Thomas Hardy (1840–1928) English novelist and poet

Source: Tess of the D'Urbervilles

“I can't imagine a romance novel published today where the hero rapes the heroine and she falls in love with him.”

Julia Quinn (1970) American novelist

Love, Imagination

“Life isn’t divided into genres. It’s a horrifying, romantic, tragic, comical, science-fiction cowboy detective novel.”

Alan Moore (1953) English writer primarily known for his work in comic books

"The Mustard magazine interview" (January 2005)
Context: Life isn’t divided into genres. It’s a horrifying, romantic, tragic, comical, science-fiction cowboy detective novel. You know, with a bit of pornography if you're lucky.

Life, Science

“This novel is fiction, except for the parts that aren't.”

Michael Crichton (1942–2008) American author, screenwriter, film producer

Parting

Quotes about novel page 2

Quotes about novel
page 2