English Novels Quotes

#1. At the height of the British Empire very few English novels were written that dealt with British power. It's extraordinary that at the moment in which England was the global superpower the subject of British power appeared not to interest most writers.

Salman Rushdie

#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. Visit any bookshop in Europe, and the shelves are filled with English novels and non-fiction books in translation - while British bookshops stock mainly English and American works.

Kate Williams

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

W. H. Auden

#5. One should not be too severe on English novels; they are the only relaxation of the intellectually unemployed.

Oscar Wilde

#6. The English novels are the only relaxation of the intellectually unemployed. But one should not be too severe on them. They show a want of knowledge that must be the result of years of study.

Oscar Wilde

#7. Middlemarch, the magnificent book which with all its imperfections is one of the few English novels for grown-up people.

Virginia Woolf

#8. Miss Austen's novels ... seem to me vulgar in tone, sterile in artistic invention, imprisoned in the wretched conventions of English society, without genius, wit, or knowledge of the world. Never was life so pinched and narrow. The one problem in the mind of the writer ... is marriageableness.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

#9. I never got any training in how to write novels as an English major at Oberlin, but I got some great training for writing novels from anthropology and from Margaret Mead.

Alan Furst

#10. In 1966, I attended Marquette University and graduated from the University of California at Santa Cruz in 1970. I received my doctorate in English from the State University of New York at Buffalo, where I wrote my dissertation on William Faulkner's early novels.

Laurence Yep

#11. In a couple of Ahdaf Soueif's novels, she gets at the certain kind of English that's being spoken by Egyptians. It's a beautiful, expressive English but it is non-standard, "broken" English that happens to be efficient, eloquent, and communicates perfectly well even if it is breaking rules.

Elliott Colla

#12. I love mystery novels ... I love seeing the dramas played out in academic departments, particularly English departments. I started reading these when I was going up for tenure.

Natasha Trethewey

#13. I majored in English in college, so I read the classic dystopian novels like '1984' and 'Brave New World.'

Lois Lowry

#14. There, Clover found the "gardens and great trees and old cottages ... so beautiful" that seeing them exhausted her. It was as if, she joked with her husband, "this English world is a huge stage-play got up only to amuse Americans. It is obviously unreal, eccentric, and taken out of novels.

Natalie Dykstra

#15. After I'd been in college for a couple years I'd read Shakespeare and Frost and Chaucer and the poets of the Harlem Renaissance. I'd come to appreciate how gorgeous the English language could be. But most fantasy novels didn't seem to make the effort.

Patrick Rothfuss

#16. My early novels were very understated and English. Fourteen years ago, I met and married my American husband, and as I learned more about his background and culture, I became interested in using American voices.

Laurie Graham

#17. The closest to my heart is not just one book - it's the whole series of novels, Indigo Diaries. The first volume, "Gods' Food," is already available in English.

Sahara Sanders

#18. I've loved 'Vanity Fair' since I was 16 years old. You know, we're all colonial hangovers in India, steeped in English literature. It is one of these novels that I read under the covers at my convent boarding school in Simla.

Mira Nair

#19. In high school, my English teacher Celeste McMenamin introduced me to the great novels and Shakespeare and taught me how to write. Essays, poetry, critical analysis. Writing is a skill that was painful then but a love of mine now.

Aaron Lazar

#20. French novels generally treat of the relations of women to the world and to lovers, after marriage; consequently there is a great deal in French novels about adultery, about improper relations between the sexes, about many things which the English public would not allow.

Lafcadio Hearn

#21. I studied philosophy, religious studies, and English. My training was writing four full-length novels and hiring an editor to tear them apart. I had enough money to do that, and then rewriting and rewriting and rewriting.

Ted Dekker

#22. When I was a teenager, I thought how great it would be if only I could write novels in English. I had the feeling that I would be able to express my emotions so much more directly than if I wrote in Japanese.

Haruki Murakami

#23. Romantic novels, the kissing scenes, the ditching scenes have taught the youth of India more English than all the English classes in school combined.

Sneha Mehta

#24. At present, the novels which we owe to English ladies form no small part of the literary glory of our country. No class of works is more honorably distinguished for fine observation, by grace, by delicate wit, by pure moral feeling.

Thomas B. Macaulay

#25. One of the less vaunted joys of Austen is that she is one of the greatest writers in the English language who also happened to write witty romance novels. Women enjoy the love stories in Austen the same way men read Hemingway for the hunting and fishing: it provides guiltless pleasure.

Alessandra Stanley

#26. 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

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

William Safire

#28. Bad books on writing tell you to "WRITE WHAT YOU KNOW", a solemn and totally false adage that is the reason there exist so many mediocre novels about English professors contemplating adultery.

Joe Haldeman

#29. Jane Austen wrote six of the most beloved novels in the English language, we are informed at the end of Becoming Jane, and so she did. The key word is beloved. Her admirers do not analyze her books so much as they just plain love them to pieces.

Roger Ebert

#30. In his novels from beginning to end, Dickens is making the same point always: that to the English governing classes the people they govern are not real.

Edmund Wilson

#31. When just a kid, moved back to Canada and looking for a taste of England, I'd picked up a book of my Gram's, a dog-eared romance from the 'sixties about English hospital 'sisters' trying to get it on with the doctors, and thought it very shocking behaviour for nuns.

Roberta Pearce

#32. 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

#33. So many Indian novels, quite unfairly, do not get the prominence they should because they have been written in a language other than English.

Vikram Seth

#34. I had wanted to write English crime novels based on the American hard-boiled style, and for the first two novels about Brixton, the critics didn't actually know I was Irish.

Ken Bruen

#35. And then the critics, going back to the novels of his maturity, found that their English had a nervous, racy vigour that eminently suited the matter.

W. Somerset Maugham