English Novel Quotes

#1. There is no happiness in love, except at the end of an English novel.

Anthony Trollope

#2. Oh! And they read English novels! David! Did you ever look into an English novel? Well, do not trouble yourself. It is nothing but a lot of nonsense about girls with fanciful names getting married.

Susanna Clarke

#3. The whole of life did not consist in going to bed with a woman, he thought, returning to Scott and Balzac, to the English novel and the French novel.

Virginia Woolf

#4. Who would ever think of learning to live out of an English novel?

Anthony Trollope

#5. The end of secrecy would be the end of the novel - especially the English novel. The English novel requires social secrecy, personal secrecy.

Ian McEwan

#6. 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

#7. There are not many English novels which deserve to be called great: Parade's End is one of them.

W. H. Auden

#8. 'Out' was my real breakthrough, the novel that became a hit in Japan and sold a lot of books, so it was sort of an obvious choice for being the first book to be translated into English.

Natsuo Kirino

#9. The English tradition offers the great tapestry novel, where you have the emotional aspect of a detective's personal life, the circumstances of the crime and, most important, the atmosphere of the English countryside that functions as another character.

Elizabeth George

#10. The basis of English law is as simple as this: If you would know the future's shape, look to the past.

John Pipkin

#11. Had I not gone to Japan in 1986, had I stayed home and majored in English literature as I'd intended to do, I might indeed have become an investment banker, an outcome that perhaps would have proved a more severe blow to the health of the U.S. economy than to the history of the novel.

John Burnham Schwartz

#12. English. That was where I met him.

Andrew Koh

#13. Memories help make us who we are.(Taken from novel...A Very English Affair)

Faith Mortimer

#14. -I think you are inhuman. If I leave you, who will you go to? Would you find another lover?
I said nothing.
-Deny it,damn you!

Michael Ondaatje

#15. I didn't fit the typical profile of a trader. I was an English major working on a novel at night. Most everyone else was a maths or economics major; most everyone else had relatives or family in banking.

Philipp Meyer

#16. Most English writers are not interested in change but in the social novel. That demands a static backdrop. I'm intensely interested in change - probably as a matter of self-preservation. What the hell is going to happen next?

J.G. Ballard

#17. I read all of the nonfiction that I could find on Chechnya, and all the while, I was searching for a novel that was set there. I couldn't find a single novel written in English that was set in the period of the two most recent Chechen wars.

Anthony Marra

#18. The English social anthropologist Geoffrey Gorer, in his 1965 Death, Grief, and Mourning, had described this rejection of public mourning as a result of the increasing pressure of a new "ethical duty to enjoy oneself," a novel "imperative to do nothing which might diminish the enjoyment of others.

Joan Didion

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

Ken Scott

#20. There is such malice, treachery, and dissimulation, even among professed friends and intimate companions, as cannot fail to strike a virtuous mind with horror; and when Vice quits the stage for a moment, her place is immediately occupied by Folly...

Tobias Smollett

#21. My English teachers gave me a copy of Atwood's 'The Handmaid's Tale' when I left high school, which has always been very special to me - it was the novel that introduced me to dystopian fiction. I'm also influenced by Edgar Allan Poe, Dickens, John Wyndham and Middle English dream-visions.

Samantha Shannon

#22. I love the novel of 'The English Patient'; I think it's a profoundly beautiful novel. I love the movie of 'The English Patient'; I think it's a profoundly beautiful movie. And they're totally different. You accept each on its own terms, and that's kind of the ideal.

Ayelet Waldman

#23. English writing tends to fall into two categories - the big, baggy epic novel or the fairly controlled, tidy novel. For a long time, I was a fan of the big, baggy novel, but there's definitely an advantage to having a little bit more control.

Zadie Smith

#24. My first novel was turned down by about twenty publishers over a period of two and a half years. Because my name is Irish and would not be familiar to English editors, one of them said: 'If she writes anything else, do let us know.' Slowly, very slowly, the books began to sell and be noticed.

Colm Toibin

#25. I spent the period reading the first novel assigned for English. And wow. If I hadn't realized I was in France yet, I do now. Because Like Water for Chocolate has sex in it. LOTS of sex.

Stephanie Perkins

#26. I've come across a novel called The Palm-Wine Drinkard, by the Nigerian writer Amos Tutuola, that is really remarkable because it is a kind of fantasy of West African mythology all told in West African English which, of course, is not the same as standard English.

William Golding

#27. People have asked me why I made the first chapter of my first novel so long, and in an invented English. The only answer I can come up with that satisfies me is, 'To keep out the scum.'

Alan Moore

#28. The lively oral storytelling scene in Scots and Gaelic spills over into the majority English-speaking culture, imbuing it with a strong sense of narrative drive that is essential to the modern novel, screenplay and even non-fiction.

Sara Sheridan

#29. Though her grasp of English was modest and his Italian non-existent, their rapport was at once intuitive and intimate, founded more on physical attraction and a shared love of the outdoors than meaningful conversation.

Robert Radcliffe

#30. I went mad before he did, you killed everything in me. Kiss me,will you. Stop defending yourself.

Michael Ondaatje

#31. Cooper wrote a novel which is absolutely indistinguishable from Austen, completely from a female point of view, completely English, no sense that he was an American.

Leslie Fiedler

#32. There is no bigger crime, in the English comic novel, than thinking you are right.

Zadie Smith

#33. I have read all my novels that were translated into English. Reading my novels is enjoyable because I forget almost all the content in them.

Haruki Murakami

#34. 'The Sound of Things Falling' may be a page turner, but it's also a deep meditation on fate and death. Even in translation, the superb quality of Vasquez's prose is evident, captured in Anne McLean's idiomatic English version. All the novel's characters are well imagined, original and rounded.

Edmund White

#35. I had thought for years, probably 30 or 40 years, that it would be a lot of fun to try my hand at a classic English mystery novel ... I love that form very much because the reader is so familiar with all of the types of characters that are in there that they already identify with the book.

Alan Bradley

#36. The young man never seemed to know what idleness was," marveled Cutler, "and every leisure moment would find the last novel, some English classic or some abstruse book on natural history in his hands.

Doris Kearns Goodwin

#37. 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

#38. Prose of the World is an enormously compelling and vivid study. The result is an ambitious, timely, and eloquent account of the relationship between early-twentieth-century fiction and the contemporary global novel in English.

Rebecca L. Walkowitz

#39. I could get a better education interviewing John Steinbeck than talking to an English professor about novels.

William Safire

#40. As a student in England, I studied French and English literature. I read L'Etranger and the rhythm of the novel felt familiar to me - very African.

Sefi Atta

#41. Sometime I'll get around to asking why the English nobility have so blasted many names that a conversation about them is like reading a Russian novel. I have a private suspicion it's done on purpose to confuse foreigners.

Jeanne M. Dams