Top 83 Best Novels Quotes
#1. I prefer all but the very worst travel books, to all but the very best novels.
Evelyn Waugh
#2. 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
#3. I give people 'If You Came Softly' when they demand proof that novels for teens can be as good as the best novels for adults.
Justine Larbalestier
#4. The best novels are those that are important without being like medicine; they have something to say, are expansive and intelligent but never forget to be entertaining and to have character and emotion at their centre.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
#5. The highest praise a writer can give another is to say he wishes he had written his book. I wish I had written Forty Words for Sorrow. Giles Blunt has a tremendous talent. If you miss Forty Words for Sorrow, you'll miss one of best novels of 2001.
Tony Hillerman
#6. All the best novels are about one thing: how we go on. The characters must survive the fallout of their own cowardice, folly, denial or misguided passion. They squander what matters most, and still they pick up the pieces.
Julia Glass
#7. What the best novels and novelists do is to offer a different way of seeing.
Aminatta Forna
#8. When someone asks me to list the 10 best novels ever written, I always refuse to answer.
Henning Mankell
#9. Anna Karenina, Anna Karenina, Anna Karenina when asked the three best novels of all time.
William Faulkner
#10. The best novels, the writer's imagination becomes the reader's reality.
William Golding
#11. Even the best novels have their share of stinker lines.
Darin Strauss
#12. I have been a film buff all my life and believe that the finest cinema is fully the equal of the best novels.
Salman Rushdie
#13. Steve Yarbrough is a writer of many gifts, but what makes Safe from the Neighbors such a magnificent achievement is its moral complexity ... Safe from the Neighbors does what only the best novels can do; after reading it, we can never see the world, or ourselves, in quite the same way.
Ron Rash
#14. There are still some people out there who believe comic books are nothing more than, well, comic books. But the true cognoscenti know graphic novels are - at their best - an amazing blend of art literature and the theater of the mind.
John Ridley
#15. 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
#16. There is nothing crazy about a dream. There is nothing crazy about pursuing your dreams.
Destin Bays
#17. One of the more interesting challenges I face when doing research for my novels is to trace the lives of women who are vital to the narrative and try my best to give them back their voices.
Susanna Kearsley
#18. The best horror novels open up, It was beautiful summer day and the smell of flowers emanated throughout the air.
Justin Alcala
#19. 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
#20. To Me, The Best Part Of Success, Is The Journey!
Latif Mercado
#21. On the front cover of Newsweek reviews "A House for Mr. Biswas" as "a marvelous prose epic that matches the best 19th century novels for richness of comic insight and final, tragic power.
V.S. Naipaul
#22. That was how the heroine of a book would play it and Diana was still writing her own story the best heroines she'd always believed took their fate into their own hands.
Anna Godbersen
#23. Ghosts from the past weave spells in the present to draw a veil of secrecy over the future.
Sean Best
#24. ...when I die I'll meet my characters in heaven. And they won't be made at me . . ." Nick Cole
Probably the coolest quote from an author I have ever heard!
Nick Cole
#25. ...the best way to ensure survival is to not needlessly endanger yourself."
"Yeah, well, I don't want to just survive. I want to *live*.
T.L. Walker
#26. Historical fiction isn't history in the conventional sense and shouldn't be judged as such. The best historical novels are loyal to history, but it is a history absorbed and set to music
Daniel Aaron
#28. Research is always the best part. As we dug deeper into the history and mythology behind each of the hallows, we discovered more and more stories - some of them deserving of novels in themselves.
Michael Scott
#29. I read a lot of literary theory when I was in graduate school, especially about novels, and the best book I ever read about endings was Peter Brooks' 'Reading for the Plot. '
Lev Grossman
#30. Others, amounting to four novels and a mess of short stories which I did not think worth preserving, I have done my best to eliminate from the record by refusing all requests for permission to reprint them, and I hope I have done a good job of making them hard to unearth.
Leslie Charteris
#31. Tightly-plotted, well-researched and beautifully drawn, this book is a real delight. Garen Ewing's mix of engaging characters, exciting old-school adventure, attractive ligne claire artwork and fluid storytelling makes The Rainbow Orchid easily one of the best graphic novels of the year.
Bryan Talbot
#33. In my opinion the best writer of historical novels. He makes you feel, smell, see every thing he describes in all his books. He doesn't only write, he makes you linked images in your mind with his words.
Edward Rutherfurd
#34. Nonfiction at its best is like fashioning a cabinet. It can never be a sculpture. It can be elegant and very beautiful, but it can never be sculpture. Captive to facts - or predetermined form - it cannot fly.
Peter Matthiessen
#35. I save the best of myself for novels, and I believe it shows.
Anne Tyler
#36. Being a nerd, which is to say going to far and caring too much about a subject, is the best way to make friends I know. For me, the spark that turns an acquaintance into a friend has usually been kindled by some shared enthusiasm like detective novels or Ulysses S. Grant.
Sarah Vowell
#37. I'll be as loving as you will be, as stubborn as I know you are, as passionate as I'm thankful you are and as supportive and understanding as I've known you to be. You are my best friend and I love you
Danielle-Claude Ngontang Mba
#38. 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
#39. 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
#40. Ty is green but never with envy. Best of all, he's usually available to help move a heavy piece of furniture.
John Hopkins
#41. You have to be kind of clued into them, they are a world of their own, and most people find them disappointing because the best short stories are not constructed like novels.
Tobias Wolff
#42. I'm not writing novels, the screenplays are my novels, so I'm gonna write it the best that I can. If the movie never gets made, it'd almost be okay because I did it. It's there on the page.
Quentin Tarantino
#43. The Zoe is the book you've been writing in. It means "life" in Greek.
Nicole Gulla
#44. I don't know how long we've sat here. All I do know is that my heart feels torn in two. Have I been here hours? Or minutes? Heartbreak is timeless".
M.R. Field
#45. My own heart is in my characters. My novels are my memories; they are the best part of me.
Gabrielle Dubois
#46. I think a writer's first job is to entertain, even in novels: to tell a compelling story that pulls the reader along toward an end. At the same time, the best stories are character-driven.
Noah Hawley
#47. Certainly I'm still mining my experiences as a journalist. I think it's no coincidence that all three of my novels basically are about how people act in a time of catastrophe. Do they go to their best self or their worst self?
Geraldine Brooks
#48. The novels that get praised in the NY Review of Books aren't worth reading. Ninety-seven percent of science fiction is adolescent rubbish, but good science fiction is the best and only literature of our times.
Robert Anton Wilson
#49. I grew up reading 19th-century novels and late Victorian children's books, so I try for a good story full of coincidence and error, landscape and weather. However, the world was radically changed during my lifetime, and I tell of that battering as best I can.
Fanny Howe
#50. Thus far, I've devoted my entire career to publishing genre short fiction, but I now look forward to applying that same level of curation to finding the best new novels and new authors.
John Joseph Adams
#52. Carver's best book yet! FROM A CHANGELING STAR combines deft characterization and fascinating extrapolation into a complex, compulsively readable thriller. I wish all science fiction novels could be this good.
Craig Shaw Gardner
#53. I am a mathematician and I can confidently say that the best figure ever produced is your phone number.
Amit Kalantri
#54. John Williams is best known for his novels, Nothing But the Night, Stoner, Butcher's Crossing, and Augustus, for which he won the National Book Award in 1973.
John Edward Williams
#55. If Stephen King was a killer, he will be the best killer ever existed, check out his novels, check out the killing... That's insane!
Deyth Banger
#56. 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
#57. 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
#58. I'm still waiting for something, searching for something I cannot describe."
"It's called true love. Most people never find it.
Destin Bays
#59. 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
#60. For me, writing post-apocalyptic novels isn't so much about exploding helicopters and fifty-megaton doomsday bombs as it is about the pleasure of dealing with the best of everything that makes us human: cleverness, grit, loyalty, and self-sacrifice.
Jeff Carlson
#61. I do my best to build a strong factual foundation for each of my novels and rely upon my author's notes to keep my conscience clear.
Sharon Kay Penman
#62. Any attempt to list the ten best science fiction novels is doomed to failure.
Ann Leckie
#63. The best of fiction, as we know, of course, doesn't tell the truth; it tales the truth.
Criss Jami
#64. Absolutely breathtaking, nail-biting, and edge-of-your-seat. Michael Koryta is a master at maintaining suspense and a hell of a good writer. THOSE WHO WISH ME DEAD is one of the best chase-and-escape novels you'll read this year-or any other year. The pace never lets up.
Nelson DeMille
#65. I'm an avid reader. Novels, non-fiction, comics, it doesn't matter. Best way in the world to feed your head.
Reid Scott
#66. 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
#67. I guess of all those novels, Don DeLillo's Falling Man is the one I like the best. I thought there were some beautiful things in that, particularly the relationship between the man who finds the briefcase and the woman whose husband owned the briefcase. It's quite a beautiful passage.
Paul Auster
#68. You'll want to read books - novels, because ladies are frivolous; poetry because ladies are sentimental; and sermons, because we are pious. If you must read essays, Mr. Emerson might be best. Your gentleman may have a nodding acquaintance with his works.
Donald McCaig
#69. The best part of the fiction in many novels is the notice that the characters are imaginary.
Franklin P. Adams
#70. I believe reading books is one of the best ways to gain real empathy for people different from ourselves, and helping boys develop empathy for girls is a cause worth fighting for.
Shannon Hale
#71. Something like that, he said, his eyes shining, and she realized just how much there was she didn't know about him. He was like one of her novels, still unfinished and best understood in the right place and at the right time. She couldn't wait to read the rest.
Jennifer E. Smith
#72. The Best Deal Is The One Where Everyone Walks Away Happy!
Latif Mercado
#73. 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
#74. The best crime novels are not about how a detective works on a case; they are about how a case works on a detective.
Michael Connelly
#75. Graham Greene's work must be included in any survey of top-rank spy novels, and 'Our Man in Havana' may be his best.
Alan Furst
#76. We all knew that you'd eventually end up with Macallan. I guess I should be offended, but maybe I read too many romance novels to no want to cheer for the two best friends.
Elizabeth Eulberg
#77. When you're running a bureaucracy the best way to safeguard your job is to make sure you're the only one who knows how the whole thing works. -Lord Julius
Dave Sim
#78. I read somewhere once that getting lost is the best way to find yourself.
Joanne Clancy
#79. The best crime novels are all based on people keeping secrets. All lying - you may think a lie is harmless, but you put them all together and there's a calamity.
Alafair Burke
#80. It's a feeling of happiness that knocks me clean out of adjectives. I think sometimes that the best reason for writing novels is to experience those four and a half hours after you write the final word.
Zadie Smith
#81. The best point of my novels, I think, is their humor. I want to keep many my works humorous.
Haruki Murakami
#82. 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
#83. Read with care, George Orwell's diaries, from the years 1931 to 1949, can greatly enrich our understanding of how Orwell transmuted the raw material of everyday experience into some of his best-known novels and polemics.
Christopher Hitchens
