Are Novels Quotes

#1. Travel books are all sorts - some are autobiographies, some are about falling in love. Some are about having great meals, some are about suffering. There are as many different kinds of travel books as there are novels. People think a travel book is one thing. It's many things.

Paul Theroux

#2. Good travel books are novels at heart.

Jonathan Raban

#3. To me, some people feel like the lives they've lived are novels. With Jack, I wanted to get my hands on the book and feverishly work my way through the pages until I got to the end.

L. H. Cosway

#4. I don't think that you can be prescriptive about anything, I mean, life is too complicated. Maybe there are novels where the author has not in the least thought about it in terms of film, which can be turned into good films.

Paul Auster

#5. For me, movies and television are interesting because they are the dominant storytelling form of our time. My first love will always be fiction, and especially novels, but I'm a writer ... I write poetry and essays and criticism and I'd love to write a whole play, and sometimes I even write scripts.

Jess Walter

#6. All my books are made up of other books. They're all deeply structured on other fiction, because I was a student in fiction and I didn't have much actual living to draw on. I suspect a lot of other people's novels are like that, too, though they might be slower to talk about it.

Zadie Smith

#7. I've learned to accept the fact that my students are far too busy preparing for their own legal careers to care one bit about the off-campus antics of Professor Burke. I get the impression that my students are vaguely aware of my novels, but are at best mildly curious.

Alafair Burke

#8. Relationships are like a book,
It takes few seconds to burn,
But
It takes years to write,
So write it carefully
And
Never let it burn

Aditya Nighot

#9. ..love is as complex an emotion as exists. There are many reasons why love does not prosper.
.. the waters are perilous, and you would do well to know that, because unlike your novels, not every story has a happy ending.

Mary Lydon Simonsen

#10. The great novels have marched with the years. They are the contemporaries of time.

Ellen Glasgow

#11. Every one of my novels could be entitled The Unbearable Lightness of Being or The Joke or Laughable Loves; the titles are interchangeable, they reflect the small number of themes that obsess me, define me, and unfortunately, restrict me. Beyond these themes, I have nothing else to say or write.

Milan Kundera

#12. You are the last thought in my mind before I drift off to sleep and the first thought when I wake up each morning.

Richard Kronick

#13. Historians turning their hands to fiction are all the rage. Since Alison Weir led the way in 2006, an ever-growing number of established non-fiction writers - Giles Milton, Simon Sebag Montefiore, Harry Sidebottom, Patrick Bishop, Ian Mortimer and myself included - have written historical novels.

Saul David

#14. Oh! No, I only mean what I have read about. It always puts me in mind of the country that Emily and her father travelled through, in The Mysteries of Udolpho. But you never read novels, I dare say?" "Why not?" "Because they are not clever enough for you - gentlemen read better books.

Jane Austen

#15. Film and novel characters are often stereotyped, but racial stereotyping in many novels or films creates & encourages labelling, discrimination & racism. ~Angelica Hopes

Angelica Hopes

#16. There are lots of authentic, moving characters in so-called systems novels, just as there are certainly deep structural ideas in some character-driven novels.

Dana Spiotta

#17. Many novels and modern publications are corrupters of morals or distorters of truth.

Ezra Taft Benson

#18. I've always had the wish, the nostalgia to be able to write detective novels. At heart, the principal themes of detective novels are close to the things that obsess me: disappearance, the problems of identity, amnesia, the return to an enigmatic past.

Patrick Modiano

#19. The romance genre is the only genre where readers are guaranteed novels that place the heroine at the heart of the story. These are books that celebrate women's heroic virtues and values: courage, honor, determination and a belief in the healing power of love.

Jayne Ann Krentz

#20. Every true novelist listens for that suprapersonal wisdom, which explains why great novels are always a little more intelligent than their authors. Novelists who are more intelligent than their books should go into another line of work.

Milan Kundera

#21. Are you sorry? Do you wish you could do it all again and go off and write novels instead of being a teacher?
No. You can't trade what is for what might have been.

Lurlene McDaniel

#22. Muse, time has taught me that all metaphysical systems, even historical facts given as truths, are hardly that, so I amuse myself with more agreeable lies; I no longer read anything but novels.

Mary Wortley Montagu

#23. He said he wants variety. The irony is that I wanted variety too. But I wanted variety in a solid, stable committed relationship where I would wake up each morning asking "What are we going to do today?" not asking "Who are you going to do today?

Aimee Lane

#24. Spy novels are traditionally about lone wolves, but how many people actually live like that?

Alan Furst

#25. There are just two things you need to fix here: the interior and the exterior.

David Mazzucchelli

#26. I really do believe some people are naturally novelists and some people are short story writers. For me, when I was in middle school or high school, I started with novels.

M.K. Hobson

#27. All my novels are about people who strive to heal and evolve.

Michel Faber

#28. People are so used to reading novels now, they just read a poem straight through to get the meaning. And that's something totally different from the slow way you read something if it's a tune; which to me a poem has to be.

Alice Oswald

#29. I like Jo Nesbo and Hakan Nesser. There are so many good books in the world. I don't want to spend time reading bad crime novels.

Maj Sjowall

#30. Writers are a savage breed, Mr. Strike. If you want life-long friendship and selfless camaraderie, join the army and learn to kill. If you want a lifetime of temporary alliances with peers who will glory in your every failure, write novels.

Robert Galbraith

#31. Novels attempt to render human experience; that's really all they are. They are meant to convey empathy for the character.

Sue Monk Kidd

#32. People used to expect literary novels to deepen the experience of living; now they are happy with any sustained display of writerly cleverness.

Brian Reynolds Myers

#33. Novels are almost like music or poetry - they just come to me in simple sentences, whereas I think my pieces get more and more complex ever since I've started using a computer.

Joan Didion

#34. Society is the stage on which manners are shown; novels are the literature. Novels are the journal or record of manners; and the new importance of these books derives from the fact, that the novelist begins to penetrate the surface, and treat this part of life more worthily.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

#35. Adult novels are as ephemeral as newspapers. Children's books stay in print for decades.

Sid Fleischman

#36. Affection is when we can't find any flaws in the other. Maybe I could if I really wanted to, but I don't want to, I accept you as you are.

Erika M. Szabo

#37. Chaim Potok wrote two novels that I think are indispensable to understanding the Hasidic and Orthodox American Jewish communities following the Holocaust: The Chosen and My Name Is Asher Lev.

Nancy Pearl

#38. Henry James said there isn't any difference between "the English novel" and "the American novel" since there are only two kinds of novels at all, the good and the bad.

Eudora Welty

#39. If novels and stories are bulletins from the progressive states of ignorance a writer passes through over the years, observations and opinions about horses are all the more so, since horses are more mysterious than life and harder to understand.

Jane Smiley

#40. When God is driven to the periphery of the public square, the human spiritual capacity longs for exercise, and it often finds it in the "suspension of disbelief" and activity of the imagination that are available in novels and movies.

John Granger

#41. I work on my novels wherever I have a PC, and I have four or five places around the world where I do have a PC. These days you can just slip a little flash drive into your top pocket, fly for 12 hours, come to another place, plug it into a computer and you are away again.

Wilbur Smith

#42. The blinking of eyes is an involuntary reflex action, provided they eyes are not watching your beauty.

Amit Kalantri

#43. Historical novels are, without question, the best way of teaching history, for they offer the human stories behind the events and leave the reader with a desire to know more.

Louis L'Amour

#44. Seth: I write of love in my novels, write of it well, if my critics and fans are to be believed, but in all of my years at that typewriter, I never found the combination of words that would convey how I felt about you. You were my everything.

Lissa Bryan

#45. Novels are written, not wished into existence. You have to sit your ass in the chair or nothing gets done.

John Dufresne

#46. However you disguise novels, they are always biographies.

William Golding

#47. I think people who share my dreams can enjoy reading my novels. And that's a wonderful thing. I said that myths are like a reservoir of stories, and if I can act as a similar kind of "reservoir," albeit a modest one, that would make me very happy.

Haruki Murakami

#48. The novels I prefer, are those that make you feel uneasy from the very first page.

Italo Calvino

#49. Kyle, you are a mellow dude ... You can't be with an agitator. And that's what she is. An agitator. She's a Jackson Pollock and you're a Thomas Kinkade.

Genevieve Dewey

#50. Modesty and conscientiousness receive their reward only in novels. In life they are exploited and then shoved aside.

Erich Maria Remarque

#51. Ultimately, culture, secular and otherwise, is a collection of survival strategies. The things that look like decoration - poetry, novels, music, dancing - if you strip away all the layers, are mechanisms for coping, surviving, understanding.

Ben Fountain

#52. I do think novels are overlooked. I did write one some years ago that I think is quite good, called 'The End of the Story,' not to blow my own horn.

Lydia Davis

#53. The further I go, the more I am confirmed in the idea that systems of metaphysics are for philosophers are what novels are for women.

Voltaire

#54. My writerly aspirations are pretty simple: to provide as many readers as possible with the same sort of wonderful immersion that I myself get from fantasy novels - and to make enough money to help feed my kids while doing so.

Saladin Ahmed

#55. Critics are not creators. They rarely write great novels, invent new technologies, or come up with a great business idea.

Jacqueline Leo

#56. Live your life like the novels that you love to read. Only do the things that when you look back, you are proud of what you accomplished, feel good about how you treated others and didn't regret not doing to trying something. Every day is a new chapter, write something.

Taylor Berke

#57. I never see a novel as a film while I'm writing it. Mostly because novels and films are so different, and I'm such an internal novelist.

Alice Hoffman

#58. Read these and know my heart. We are not quite novels.

Gabrielle Zevin

#59. The problem with the literary hothouse of New York City is that people spend so much time looking in the mirror. They go to parties with people who are just like them, and they write novels about people who are just like them. It's limiting.

Anne Fadiman

#60. Remember where you are and adjust yourself accordingly, not vice-versa ... otherwise, you might be toast.

Alisa Steinberg

#61. Good novels are not written, they're rewritten!

Michael Crichton

#62. Poetry, plays, novels, music, they are the cry of the human spirit trying to understand itself and make sense of our world.

L.M. Elliott

#63. The fact is that most crime novels contain a good many punchlines. They are just rather darker than the ones you might hear in a comedy club.

Mark Billingham

#64. I guess the most epic romances are still tucked away within the pages of her favorite novels, safely swathed in inked lies and faded paper promises. Forever fictional. Just like love.

S.L. Jennings

#65. There are a lot of very good New York novels, but there's no single all-encompassing novel, the way you could look at any number of Dickens books and say we know London as a result of that.

Pete Hamill

#66. Though the trials of life are never easy, someone to stand with you and help you with your burdens is one of the true essences of living. It is well that two should join together to face life as friends as well as lovers.

Micheal Rivers

#67. Novels may teach us as wholesome a moral as the pulpit. There are "sermons in stones," in healthy books, and "good in everything.

Charles Caleb Colton

#68. Women need to assert their rights in the bedroom too - many women have done so in the workplace; many women have done so in house chores and parenting, but women's rights are sorely lacking in the bedroom.

J.F. Kelly

#69. My advice is to write about what you are interested in. If you read science fiction and fantasy, then write in that genre. If you read romance novels, then try writing one.

Michael Scott

#70. I see so, so many novels written by people who are obviously short story writers. What they end up doing, it's going the full distance, covering three hundred pages or so, but they do it by just writing five or six long stories, and weaving them together, making them interdependent.

Stephen Graham Jones

#71. The most valuable land in the world is the graveyard. In the graveyard are buried all of the unwritten novels, never-launched businesses, unreconciled relationships, and all of the other things that people thought, 'I'll get around to that tomorrow.' One day, however, their tomorrows ran out.

Todd Henry

#72. Many people have said to me, "What a pity you had such a big family to raise." "Think of the novels and the short stories and the poems you never had time to write because of that." And I looked at my children and I said, "These are my poems, these are my stories."

Olga Masters

#73. Novels by British writers are among my favorites because our family has enjoyed travel in England and because they are written with an economy of words as if they were written with a pen instead of a computer. Penelope Fitzgerald is a favorite.

Beverly Cleary

#74. All of my scripts are based on other people's novels. Generally, I consider myself as one who writes for theatre. I do not see film work as a continuation of writing for theatre. It is more of an interruption of the writing process.

Tom Stoppard

#75. Novels are pirated all the time, but it's hard to imagine that you're at work and you open up the attachment that your brother sent you and it's the new Phillip Roth novel.

Adam Mansbach

#76. Well, I think in my first two novels, both the characters are pretty neurotic, which I would say that I am.

Curtis Sittenfeld

#77. There is interest in a crime-based reality show. With my novels, we are now editing the second book in a series about a defense lawyer whose name is Samantha Brinkman. And I am reviewing speaking engagement opportunities.

Marcia Clark

#78. My hands are in his hair and his arms wrap around my waist tighter. I know what Henry does to me. I'm space bound. A rocket about to blast off. And I want Henry to send me to the moon.

Lauren Hammond

#79. The first six months are what I call the La La Land phase. This is what a lot of romantic novels, songs, and movies are based upon. Enjoy the courtship, nights out, and fun. You will eventually come back to reality.

Pamela Cummins

#80. The characters in my novels are my own unrealised possibilities. That is why I am equally fond of them all and equally horrified by them. Each one has crossed a border that I myself have circumvented.

Milan Kundera

#81. I read novels for entertainment rather than for edification, so I tend not to read the sort of novels that are said to illuminate the human condition.

Richard Dawkins

#82. I really love to make sweeping historical gestures that are like little illustrations of novels.

Kara Walker

#83. It's night in the Free People's World Tree Library. All the librarians are asleep, ... between the pages of their enchanted novels.

Kelly Link

#84. Thomas Mann used to write education novels and now you can write an education memoir, and there are all these memoirs coming out now about people's relationships with books. Like anything else, these can be good or bad. The genre doesn't make it good or bad, it's the execution.

Marco Roth

#85. Second novels are bears. As are other people's expectations for them. I think taking the time you need with the second book is key. Writers spend years and years on their first novels and then are often expected to turn out a second at warp speed, a recipe for failure.

Jandy Nelson

#86. Poems are taught as though the poet has put a secret key in his words and it is the reader's job to find it. Poems are not mystery novels.

Natalie Goldberg

#87. I have no desire to write historical anything or futuristic anything - I want to find a way to get at the essence of what it's like to be alive now. The reason why great novels from centuries ago are still great is because that's what they were doing; it's like a message from another culture.

Jonathan Dee

#88. At conventions, one of the standard questions I get is, 'Are you writing any new novels?' To which I used to respond, in my smart-[alec] fashion, 'No, I've decided to write only old novels.'

Peter David

#89. We are going to have that thing everyone talks about, that indescribable, indefinable thing that everybody wants to find...Here's to endless stargazing.

Ella Harper

#90. Novels are longer than life.

Natalie Clifford Barney

#91. The novels have done so well because the drawings are abstract, black-and-white. This adds to the universality of the story. "Persepolis" also has dreamlike moments, and the drawings help maintain cohesion and consistency.

Marjane Satrapi

#92. Most novels, I find, are three times longer than they need to be. Very little happens, and I don't want to waste my time with them.

Chuck Palahniuk

#93. 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

#94. Romance novels feature nuanced portrayals of female characters having adventures, making choices, and accepting themselves just as they are. When we say these stories are silly and unrealistic, we are telling young girls not to expect to be the heroines in their own real lives.

Maya Rodale

#95. Almost all novels are improved by cutting from the top. On their first pages, authors parade those favourite effects which disgust the impartial reader.

James Buchan

#96. Romance novels are my favorite books to read. I write young adult romances, and am so happy to be promoting this wonderful genre.

Simone Elkeles

#97. As far as benefits to reading historical novels, there are several! For one thing, you learn about life in another era. Secondly, these novels help us to develop a deeper understanding of the legacy of women who came before us and the strides made by our ancestors.

Mary Pope Osborne

#98. Teaching does allow me to keep one foot in the youthful waters I tend to occupy in my novels, so I'm thankful for that. My students also remind me on a daily basis that the stories I collected during my district attorney days are actually interesting to people who haven't had that experience.

Alafair Burke

#99. The movies are fun, but I'm a novelist. In many ways, screenwriting is much easier than writing novels. I find screenplays twenty times easier to write than a novel.

Nicholas Sparks

#100. There are three secrets to writing a novel. Unfortunately nobody knows what they are.

W. Somerset Maugham