Best Novel Quotes

#1. People who shop at Barnes and Noble voted Ulysses the best novel of the last century, and who's to tell them different? There was a point when I would have liked to, but apparently that's just because I'm a bitch.

Dale Peck

#2. I'm a novelist at heart. My sole intention is to write the best novel possible. I don't think about the film potential at all.

Nicholas Sparks

#3. The best novel I wrote was one called 'Crusoe's Daughter,' which never won any prizes. But I was getting somewhere in that. I'm not sure I have in any of the others.

Jane Gardam

#4. Besides being witty and funny and maybe the best novel ever written, it's also the most perfect romance in all of literature and nothing in life can ever measure up, so I spend my life limping in its shadow.

Shannon Hale

#5. In the end, for me, the sole single goal is to write the best novel that I can. Whether or not it gets made or gets purchased.

Nicholas Sparks

#6. Bonsai won the Chilean Critics Award for best novel of the year in 2006and it's easy to understand why.

Jonathan Messinger

#7. Writers are notoriously unable to know about themselves. Faulkner thought 'The Fable' was his best novel. F. Scott Fitzgerald liked 'Tender Is the Night,' an experimental novel.

Joyce Carol Oates

#8. The best novels capture the times in which the writer lives, which accounts for the current, if contrasting taste for lost utopias and dystopian nightmares peopled by vampires and wolves.

Chloe Thurlow

#9. Every happy moments looks perfect till it gets messy

Sheeja Jose

#10. the best of Cervantes is untranslatable, and this undeniable fact is in itself an incentive [for one and all] to learn Spanish.

Aubrey F.G. Bell

#11. I believe that the short story is as different a form from the novel as poetry is, and the best stories seem to me to be perhaps closer in spirit to poetry than to novels.

Tobias Wolff

#12. Ernest Hemingway said it best: "A novel is just like real life, with the boring parts taken out.

Lee Gimenez

#13. I find that a lot of my best character stuff and ideas come unwittingly from novels. In scripts, it's a lot about the outward signs of whatever's happening - you have the end result. Whereas in a novel you get a buildup of the whys and wherefores, and you're let into the backstory.

Alison Pill

#14. 'The Man in the High Castle' is still the best what-if-the-Axis-had-won novel.

Adrian McKinty

#15. You always try to do your own thing. One of the things I wanted to do was to write a book that combines some of the best traits of contemporary fantasy with some of the traits of the historical novel.

George R R Martin

#16. The best of Donald Westlake's pseudonymous thrillers about Parker, the toughest burglar who ever lived ... Out of print for years and years, Butcher's Moon is the ultimate Parker novel, best read as an installment in the series as a whole but comprehensible and wholly satisfying on its own.

Terry Teachout

#17. I tend to write about towns because that's what I remember best. You can put a boundary on the number of characters you insert into a small town. I tend to create a lot of characters, so this is a sort of restraint on the character building I do for a novel.

Tom Drury

#18. Fancy a novel about Chicago or Buffalo, let us say, or Nashville, Tennessee! There are just three big cities in the United States that are 'story cities'- New York, of course, New Orleans, and, best of the lot, San Francisco.

Frank Norris

#19. By the way, the best place to find names for fictional characters, if you are ever foolish enough to write a novel, is in a Bradshaw or an ABC. All the nicest people always sound like railway stations.

Beverley Nichols

#20. I prefer all but the very worst travel books, to all but the very best novels.

Evelyn Waugh

#21. The contemporary crime novel is, at its best, a novel of character. That's where the suspense comes from.

Val McDermid

#22. The short story seems like the best of all possible worlds. I do feel it is closer to writing poetry than to writing a novel, with its requirements of concentration and economy.

James Lasdun

#23. Do you know the best way to get your body heat back?" Ethan asked her as he looked her in the eyes and stroked her glossy brown hair. "The way to warm up is to lie next to another person. Naked.

Amanda Bretz

#24. I tend to be more of a novel writer. In fact, some of my novels started out as short stories, and I just got carried away! I think some of my best writing is in the short story form, but novels come more naturally to me.

Bruce Coville

#25. The best way to write a novel is to do it behind your own back.

China Mieville

#26. The best ending ever, for a science fiction book - or any novel, now that I think about it - was in Rendezvous With Rama. You know that you're at the end of the book and yet, there is no resolution. Then he hits you with those last six words. Better yet, the power is in the very last word. Wow!

John Gaver

#27. The best way of keeping a low profile was to immerse himself in the mundane. Act like them, talk like them. A smile, a joke was all it took - at least during the day. The night was his own.

Caroline Mitchell

#28. It had been fourteen years and I hadn't had anything published. I had 250 rejection slips. I got my first novel published and it was called Kinflicks. It turned out to be a best seller.

Lisa Alther

#29. The best project is one that asks a novel question.

Walter Gilbert

#30. We did photograph albums, best dresses, favourite novels, and once someone's own novel. It was about a week in a telephone box with a pair of pyjamas called Adolf Hitler. The heroine was a piece of string with a knot in it.

Jeanette Winterson

#31. Ford Maddox Ford's 'The Good Soldier' is my favourite novel. I first read it in the 1950s and have read it about 20 times since. It's possibly the best-constructed book in the English language.

Ruth Rendell

#32. The best picture has not yet been painted; the greatest poem is still unsung; the mightiest novel remains to be written; the divinest music has not been conceived, even by Bach. In science, probably ninety-nine percent of the knowable has not yet been discovered.

Lincoln Steffens

#33. The best way in the world for breaking up a writer's block is to write a lot.

John Gardner

#34. The novel, in its best form, I regard as one of the most powerful engines of civilization ever invented.

John Herschel

#35. LIFE IS TOO SHORT TO BE UNHAPPY ... SO LAUGH INSANELY, KISS SOFTLY, AND MAKE LOVE PASSIONATELY ...

Muffin

#36. I never get writer's block. My secret ... I have purring cats in surround sound while I write ... best white noise on the planet. R.Rose when asked how she deals with writer's block.

R. Rose

#37. The privilege is not writing a novel, it's to have someone read it. When you look at it that way, you realize the responsibility you have to put your very best on the page.

Javier A. Robayo

#38. Life is not like a novel, but a novel can be like life. The best ones always are.

Aidan Chambers

#39. She leaned forward and opened her eyes wide. "Allow me to offer you some free advice - trade your gems away and keep your opinions to yourself.

Stephen Whitfield

#40. Hacks are killing our national literary culture. America treats best-sellers like literary lions and literary lions worse than stray dogs.

David B. Lentz

#41. For me, a good YA novel is the best kind of comfort food.

Hallie Ephron

#42. You're my best friend,
You're my love,
You're my life.
I can't wait to
make you
my wife!
Love, Ryan

Tina Reber

#43. My objectives are very limited. I want to do the best I can with the talent God gave me. I hope to goodness that every novel I do gets better and better, not worse and worse.

Harper Lee

#44. The best part of the fiction in many novels is the notice that the characters are imaginary.

Franklin P. Adams

#45. Her friend glanced between Cait and Dante.
But Cait, The Hulk has requested my absence. I believe it best if I cooperate.

Abby Niles

#46. A good novel is worth more then the best scientific study.

Saul Bellow

#47. Hughes' debut novel, At Dawn, follows a former All-American wrestler, and is there any better metaphor for contemporary American life? We're all wrestling, tussling with the economy, no jobs, doing the best we can. Hughes doesn't flinch from the tough existential questions. He embraces them.

Joshua Mohr

#48. Art, though, is never the voice of a country; it is an even more precious thing, the voice of the individual, doing its best to speak, not comfort of any sort, but truth. And the art that speaks it most unmistakably, most directly, most variously, most fully, is fiction; in particular, the novel.

Eudora Welty

#49. Is only a novel ... or, in short, only some work in which the greatest powers of the mind are displayed, in which the most thorough knowledge of human nature, the happiest delineation of its varieties, the liveliest effusions of wit and humour, are conveyed to the world in the best-chosen language.

Victoria Connelly

#50. Reading Claire Cooks novel is like eating some exotic dish about which you say, Wow, this is great! Whats in it? The ingredients here are: intelligence, humor, poignancy, revelation and, perhaps best of all, true originality. Ready to Fall seems to me to be ready to soar.

Elizabeth Berg

#51. The novel has become the leading hero in the drama of literary development in our time precisely because it best of all reflects the tendencies of a new world still in the making; it is, after all, the only genre born of this new world and in total affinity with it.

Mikhail Bakhtin

#52. 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.

Ken Follett

#53. Irving Karchmar, a Sufi convert and friend, and the author of the novel Master of the Jinn, said it best: at some point, the devoted pass from belief into certainty.

G. Willow Wilson

#54. The sublime signals the limits of rationality - the 'sleep' of reason - and was best communicated by obscurity. So in the same spirit as the recipes 'to make a romance', 'seven types of obscurity' could be proposed for a Gothic novel:

Nick Groom

#55. My illusion, the idea of a soul mate, was so entrenched in my fantasy that the thought of letting him go, wrecked me.

M.R. Field

#56. A friend of mine suddenly announced she had written a novel and got a publishing deal; I thought, 'Hang on ... if she can do it, I can bloody well do it, too.' That novel went to a bidding war, and went on to be a huge best-seller.

Jane Green

#57. The novel, arguably the author's best, had a disquieting power, like a sleeping crocodile.

Roberto Bolano

#58. I used to think that one day I should write a really great novel, but I've long ceased even to hope for that. All I want people to say is that I do my best. I do work. I never let anything slipshod get past me. I think I can tell a good story and I can create characters that ring true.

W. Somerset Maugham

#59. It took me the bulk of my twenties to write one book about a family of alligator wrestlers. Whereas somebody like Steve Martin is releasing his latest banjo symphony, having just completed another movie and acclaimed, best-selling novel.

Karen Russell

#60. When we find a painting or a novel or a musical we love, we are briefly connected to the best that human beings are capable of, in ourselves and others, and we are reminded that our path through the world must intersect with others. Whether we like it or not, we are not alone.

Andy Miller

#61. To write a novel may be pure pleasure. To live a novel presents certain difficulties. As for reading a novel, I do my best to get out of it.

Karl Kraus

#62. The best way to keep your house spotless is to begin writing a novel.

Jen Knox

#63. It is a novel kind of supremacy, the best that life can offer, to have as servants by skill those who by nature are our masters.

Baltasar Gracian

#64. Many Scandinavian writers who had made their name in literary fiction felt they wanted to have a go at the crime novel to show they could compete with the best. If Salman Rushdie had been Norwegian, he would definitely have written at least one thriller.

Jo Nesbo

#65. 'The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel' is a British comedy-drama directed by John Madden. The film is based on the 2004 novel, 'These Foolish Things', by Deborah Moggach.

Tena Desae

#66. Why would a novel - which is all about the inward processes of people's developing feelings and developing relationships - why would you be able to portray that in pictures with as few words as possible, which is what the best films are?

Sebastian Faulks

#67. There're no novels that I like to read so I write my own novels, and then I read them again, and it's the best thing.

Willow Smith

#68. ... Here we come close to one of the definitions of literary fiction. Even the best kind of popular novel just comes straight at you; you have no conversation with a popular novel. Whereas you do have a conversation (you have an intense argument) with [literary fiction].

Martin Amis

#69. The places and people in the following stories have been represented accurately to the best of my ability; yet my writing is supposed to be a tale, and as in any historical novel, my own imagination has blended with fact to create poetical reality.

Eric Sloane

#70. In these modes, energy is at best regarded by architects as a set of necessary quantifications, bureaucratic mandates, and checklists rather than as a fundamental agent in novel formations of architecture.

William W. Braham

#71. His words had caused her to laugh, cry, yell, throw things across the room, and feel sympathy, empathy, anger, arousal and disgust. It was the best non-novel she had ever read.

Ella Dominguez

#72. The essay form has superceded the novel as the vehicle that best suggests the prevailing apocalyptic gestalt, and as the talisman that is most able to repel the onset of paralysing dread.

Adam Parfrey

#73. When one writes a novel about grown people, he knows exactly where to stop - that is, with a marriage; but when he writes about juveniles, he must stop where he best can.

Mark Twain

#74. My son, Wolf, was born when I was past 40 and the author of a best-selling novel. That means he has grown up a middle-class child - one who sometimes asks me for stories of my childhood but knows nothing of what it means to grow up poor and afraid. I have worked to make sure of that.

Dorothy Allison

#75. What great literature does best is to show us those moments which make life worth living.

Marty Rubin

#76. When I'm working on a serious and solid book ... I read about a detective novel a day. It's the best legal dope in the world. It makes you feel good until the next morning you can work again.

Mary Lee Settle

#77. I do think a good story in a novel is fair game and there's nothing wrong with adapting that. It sometimes gets a bit facile where they think: "Let's get the next best-seller and see if we can turn it into a film."

Colin Firth

#78. You Can't Change Your Life... Until You Change Your Heart, and You Can't Change Your Heart... Until You Change Your Mind!

Latif Mercado

#79. With every beat of my heart, I believe she thought keeping her secret was in everyone's best interest. She thought the secret would be buried with her, never to be revealed. She thought wrong.

Misa Rush

#80. My best advice for aspiring writers is to read a lot and write. Don't worry if you don't get your first, fifth or tenth novel published, if you keep going you'll make it. Also read "how to write" books as they may make the process a bit quicker.

Katie Fforde

#81. My mom says . . . there are bad people who hurt others for fun . . . and there are good people who do it by accident. Like, they make a mistake?

I think you're a good person.

Svetlana Chmakova

#82. My own heart is in my characters. My novels are my memories; they are the best part of me.

Gabrielle Dubois

#83. You hear the best stories from ordinary people. That sense of immediacy is more real to me than a lot of writerly, literary-type crafted stories. I want that immediacy when I read a novel.

Chuck Palahniuk

#84. Guy Gavriel Kay's 'Tigana' is, in my opinion, one of the best, if not the best fantasy novel ever written. It's beautifully written, the characters are unforgettable, the worldbuilding is exquisite.

David B. Coe

#85. Without a doubt the two best words in the English language are The End

Ken Scott

#86. Reading is, at its best, not an escape; it is genuine experience. A novel is not a monologue, but a conversation, a collaboration between writer and reader, an invaluable exchange of human conditions.

Jonathan Evison

#87. Her face was the best of Raquel Welch and Christy Brinkley combined. All atop a curvaceous body that would make Rubens drop his paintbrush."
-Adam W. Jones, Fate Ball

Adam W. Jones

#88. The best way is always to stop when you are going good and when you know what will happen next. If you do that every day when you are writing a novel you will never be stuck. That is the most valuable thing I can tell you so try to remember it.

Ernest Hemingway,

#89. Mags, I don't know how many more times I will have to say this, but here it goes. You're amazing, you deserve the best, and I want nothing more than to be whatever you need me to be.

Kristen Hope Mazzola

#90. To know what you want to say is not the best condition for writing a novel. Novels go happiest when you discover something you did not know you knew: an insight into one of your opaque characters, a metaphor that startles you ... a truth ... that used to elude you.

Norman Mailer

#91. A novel can best be defined as a long piece of prose with something wrong with it,

Neil Gaiman

#92. I've sold too many books to get good reviews anymore. There's a lot of jealousy, because [reviewers] think they can write a good novel or a best-seller and get frustrated when they can't. I've learned to despise them.

John Grisham

#93. I strongly believe that the art of the novel works best when the writer identifies with whoever he or she is writing about. Novels in the end are based on the human capacity, compassion, and I can show more compassion to my characters if I write in a first person singular.

Orhan Pamuk

#94. When I was 26, I wrote my first mystery, 'The Thomas Berryman Number', and it was turned down by, I don't know, 31 publishers. Then it won an Edgar for Best First Novel. Go figure.

James Patterson

#95. Many of us, if pressed, would admit that we'd prefer a cash gift to another pair of pajamas or bestselling novel. But giving the green can make even the best of us uncomfortable - the etiquette is confusing, and those who relish picking out the perfect something can miss some of the fun.

Jean Chatzky

#96. Kissing her to keep her quiet was the best idea that he'd had all week. One hand drifted into her loose hair as she responded to each kiss, while the other caught her waist and held her close to him.

Elaine White

#97. The monotony of staying in one place is the best thing for writing a novel. Having regular habits, a kind of security, but especially no big surprises, no shocks.

Paul Theroux

#98. For me, 'Moby-Dick' is more than the greatest American novel ever written; it is a metaphysical survival manual - the best guidebook there is for a literate man or woman facing an impenetrable unknown: the future of civilization in this storm-tossed 21st century.

Nathaniel Philbrick

#99. Somewhere In Time is the story of a love which transcends time , What Dreams May Come is the story of a love which transcends death ... I feel that they represent the best writing I have done in the novel form.

Richard Matheson

#100. I think humor is key [to a successful middle-grade novel]. Kids like to read for entertainment, and the best way to entertain kids is to make them laugh.

Jeff Kinney