Quotes about novel

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“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.”

“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…”

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

“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.”

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

“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.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

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

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

“[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.”

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

“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.”

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

“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”

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

“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!”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

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

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

“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.”

“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.”

“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?”

“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.”

“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.”

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

That would fix a lot of people.”

“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.”

“[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.”

“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.”

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

“All novels are sequels; influence is bliss.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

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

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

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

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

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

“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'.”

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

“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.”

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

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

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

“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.”

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

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

“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.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

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

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

“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.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

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

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

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

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

“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.”

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

“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.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“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.”

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

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

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

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