Top 100 Great Novel Quotes
#1. One has to be just a little crazy to write a great novel
John Gardner
#2. Eucalyptus. Murray Bail. Someone told me that this was a great novel so I bought it, but then I discovered that it was great Australian novel so I put it away. I find it difficult to get to grips with Australian novels. Difficult, but not impossible.
Susan Hill
#3. Sometimes, as in a great novel, you cannot see until you get to the end that God was leaving clues for you all along.
Lauren F. Winner
#4. My notion of a great novel is something like a five-hundred-page shaggy-dog story, with only the punch line omitted.
Edward Abbey
#5. In every great novel, who is the hero all the time? Not any of the characters, but some unnamed and nameless flame behind them all.
D.H. Lawrence
#6. When I was a child, writing was the worst possible choice of a career in my family. My father had always identified himself as a writer to my mother when they met. When they met, he was writing this great novel, there was no doubt about it.
Nick Flynn
#7. If you want to write the next great novel, but you think, No, this won't work because no one will buy it or it won't be any good, then you talk yourself out of taking a risk.
John Tesh
#8. I went into journalism in a grandiose way. I thought maybe I'd do a little journalism whilst I write the great novel of all time you see
one has to keep oneself afloat.
Neal Ascherson
#9. If a novel reveals true and vivid relationships, it is a moral work, no matter what the relationships consist in. If the novelisthonours the relationship in itself, it will be a great novel.
D.H. Lawrence
#10. Just as we bemoan the passing away of the Great Novel, a great novelist is likely to emerge, perhaps even from Denmark or Switzerland, to prove us wrong.
J.M. Coetzee
#11. The really great novel tends to be the exact negative of its author's life.
Andre Maurois
#12. A great novel is concerned primarily with the interior lives of its characters as they respond to the inconvenient narratives that fate imposes on them. Movie adaptations of these monumental fictions often fail because they become mere exercises in interior decoration.
Richard Schickel
#13. A scrupulous man will never produce a great novel.
Julien Green
#14. Reading a great novel gives the same feeling you have when you fall in love.
Luigina Sgarro
#15. There is always something of the writer in the work but I don't think Melville had to be swallowed by a whale to write a great novel. If I had lived the lives of all the characters of the songs I've written, that would truly be an extraordinary story.
Michael Stipe
#16. Life is a great novel, discovering your calling is the far better sequel
Carl Henegan
#17. the assistant principal told me how he "loved to read a great novel and discuss the meaning of life." He smiled, sighed wistfully, and then turned suddenly serious. "But we can't do that at our school. We have to focus on basic skills and classroom management.
John Owens
#18. When I was young I longed to write a great novel that should win me fame. Now that I am getting old my first book is written to amuse children
L. Frank Baum
#19. It is my contention that a really great novel is made with a knife and not a pen. A novelist must have the intestinal fortitude to cut out even the most brilliant passage so long as it doesn't advance the story.
Frank Yerby
#20. My father had always identified himself as a writer to my mother when they met. When they met, he was writing this great novel, there was no doubt about it. Part of why she left him was this delusion of greatness and identifying it very directly with being an artist.
Nick Flynn
#21. As much as I revere great writing, and am still humbled by it, literary activities are no longer esoteric to me. When I read a great novel - something that I could never have written myself - I'm still looking at it a little bit like a technician.
Jonathan Lethem
#22. The Butcher Boy is a very great novel indeed and a very important Irish novel. The ambiguity of that is, he's writing a book about an appalling situation and he does it in a hilarious way.
Stephen Rea
#23. 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
#24. Johnny Flora "The Spell of Zalanon" > quotable quote (edit)
"Every page of a great novel should be crafted like a beautiful melody, to linger on long after the music stops playing."
- Johnny Flora "The Spell of Zalanon
Johnny Flora
#25. Every great novel begins with a single word. One word, followed by another and another and another. Sentences forming paths to that dream.
Pamela Morris
#26. The great novel of twentieth-century New York might be the Daily News.
Pete Hamill
#27. Virginia Woolf's great novel, 'Mrs. Dalloway,' is the first great book I ever read. I read it almost by accident when I was in high school, when I was 15 years old.
Michael Cunningham
#28. Moral philosophy is very largely a branch of fiction. Despite this, a philosopher has yet to write a great novel. The fact should not be surprising. In philosophy the truth about human life is of no interest
John N. Gray
#29. As a precocious teen I dreamed of being Graham Greene. Well, as it turned out, I never wrote a great novel, sadly, and I never converted to Catholicism, happily, but I did do one thing he did. That is, in middle age I moved to a seaside town and got into a right barney with the local powers-that-be.
Julie Burchill
#31. I'm willing to keep an open mind about the existence of God or whether or not Joye's Ulysses is a great novel, but I have no doubt that one way or another child molesters are nurtured, not born.
Rafael Yglesias
#32. Every page of a great novel should be crafted like a beautiful melody, to linger on long after the music stops playing.
Johnny Flora
#33. [A] great novel will allow you to transcend the social, racial and political limitations imposed by the vicissitudes of life and to find a deep fraternity based on empathy.
Azar Nafisi
#34. I always seem to get inspiration and renewed vitality by contact with this great novel land of yours which sticks up out of the Atlantic.
Winston Churchill
#35. One must be just a little crazy to write a great novel. One must be capable of allowing the darkest, most ancient and shrewd parts of one's being to take over the work from time to time.
John Gardner
#36. When some political or ecclesiastical pamphlet, or novel, or poem is making a great commotion, you should remember that he who writes for fools always finds a large public.
Arthur Schopenhauer
#37. Grade A objectivity won't come from those who are closest to us. It will come from outsiders. That's where we'll find divergent thinking, unexpected questions, novel ideas, differences of opinion, and added expertise.
David Sturt
#38. The great novels have marched with the years. They are the contemporaries of time.
Ellen Glasgow
#39. I started a novel in the back of a notebook, and it was great because it looked like I was taking notes. And I just, I kept it up, it was sort of fantasy, it was part soap opera. It was utterly dreadful, but that's how I got hooked.
Jacqueline Carey
#40. Have the courage to analyze great emotions to create characters who shall be lofty and true. The whole art of the analytical novel lies there.
Paul Bourget
#41. A novel is a great act of passion and intellect, carpentry and largess. From the very beginning, I wrote to explain my own life to myself, and I invited readers who chose to make the journey with me to join me on the high wire.
Pat Conroy
#42. John Green has written a powerful novel - one that plunges headlong into the labyrinth of life, love, and the mysteries of being human. This is a book that will touch your life, so don't read it sitting down. Stand up, and take a step into the Great Perhaps.
KL Going
#43. I was saving the name of 'Geisel' for the Great American Novel.
Dr. Seuss
#44. 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
#45. The whole process of writing a novel is having this great, beautiful idea and then spoiling it.
Diane Johnson
#46. 'The Great Gatsby,' by F. Scott Fitzgerald, remains the most perfect novel that has ever come out of the United States. Everything in the book moves as it should, in the manner of a piece by Bach or Mozart.
Frank Delaney
#47. Much has been made about the death of the novel and the end of literature as it's seen to be assailed by technology, by the web, by the many and varied new forms of entertainment and culture. I don't share that pessimism because I think it is one of the great inventions of the human spirit.
Richard Flanagan
#48. Writing a novel mimics what we bring to our journey of life. God is the great editor who purges the faulty, the awkward, and all the bits that are just plain wrong, so the optimal story can finally emerge.
Denise M. Baran-Unland
#49. If a poem is concentrated, a closed fist, then a novel is relaxed and expansive, an open hand: it has roads, detours, destinations; a heart line, a head line; morals and money come into it. Where the fist excludes and stuns, the open hand can touch and encompass a great deal in its travels.
Sylvia Plath
#50. Video games are a waste of time for men with nothing else to do. Real brains don't do that. On occasion? Sure. As relaxation? Great. But not full time - And a lot of people are doing that. And while they're doing that, I'll go ahead and write another novel.
Ray Bradbury
#51. It will be worthy of a free, enlightened, and, at no distant period, a great nation, to give to mankind the magnanimous and too novel example of a people always guided by an exalted justice and benevolence.
George Washington
#52. Schopenhauer wrote that to desire immortality is to desire the eternal perpetuation of a great mistake. He was correct.
Michael LaRocca
#53. And even though they had not had sex yet, he was a great lover, replacing sex with the science of bravery and inner strength. Meredith had always wanted a man with this kind of depth.
Keira D. Skye
#54. The great advantage of a novel is you can put in whatever comes into your head - it has the same shape as the human brain.
Michel Houellebecq
#55. Great, big, serious novels always get awards. If it's a battle between a great, big, serious novel and a funny novel, the funny novel is doomed.
Neil Gaiman
#56. Writing a successful novel is a great challenge, and you have to be a bit of a poet, a bit of a critic, a bit of a dramatist, a bit of a philosopher, a bit of a social scientist, to pull it off.
Anis Shivani
#57. When my first novel was published, I went in great excitement round bookshops in central London to see if they had stocked it.
Antony Beevor
#58. The great American novel has not only already been written, it has already been rejected.
W. Somerset Maugham
#59. Most of 'Let the Great World Spin' is centered on the day in 1974 when Philippe Petit walked on a tightrope between the two towers of the World Trade Center, creating an astonishing spectacle that intersects with the lives of many of the novel's multiple protagonists.
Susan Barker
#60. I know a lot of writers who would much rather be writing the Great American Novel, but they've got bills to pay and alimony, and so they take a job at a less-than-reputable paper. You know, you do what you gotta do.
Eric Stoltz
#61. 'Great Expectations' was an important novel in my adolescence. It was very much one of those emblematic novels that made me wish I could write like that. It helped that my models as a writer were dead over a hundred years before I began to write.
John Irving
#62. When I first got back from the war, I said, 'I'm gonna write the Great American Novel about the Vietnam War.' So I sat down and wrote 1,700 pages of sheer psychotherapy drivel. It was first person, and there would be pages about wet socks and cold feet.
Karl Marlantes
#63. A great believer in precedent,' Della Street said. 'I think if he were ever confronted with a really novel situation he'd faint. He runs to his law books, digs around like a mole and finally comes up with case that's what he calls on all fours and was decided seventy-five or a hundred years ago.
Erle Stanley Gardner
#64. I've always wondered why there isn't a great French novel about the German occupation. The nouveau roman authors weren't interested in telling that sort of thing.
Manuel Puig
#65. Most great books have been about striving in some sense. In a sense, money is the great topic of the novel. You couldn't necessarily say that about poetry.
Chad Harbach
#66. Many great authors of the 19th century wrote under conditions of strict censorship. The great thing about the art of writing a novel, is that you can write about anything. All you have to say is that it's fiction.
Orhan Pamuk
#67. Looking back on my life, I sigh. The caprice of youth goes with the wind, I've no regrets.
Roman Payne
#68. It's a pity that the land of great leaders like Chandragupta Maurya, Ashoka and Akbar, has to be led by a dummy PM. - Shruti Ranjan
Tuhin A. Sinha
#69. There was something wonderful about a blank sheet of notepaper. The lines were there, just waiting to be filled, and the page could turn into anything from a grocery list to the opening of The Great American Novel. The possibilities were endless.
Joanne Fluke
#70. This reminded him of Alvis Bender's contention that stories were like nations - Italy, a great epic poem, Britain, a thick novel, America, a brash motion picture in technicolor ...
Jess Walter
#71. I love the secrecy of writing fiction. When I write a novel, I don't tell anybody what I'm doing. I'm living in my private world. And it's a great sensation.
Umberto Eco
#72. I've always been impelled to say the truth. When I was 14, in 1954, I already wrote a gay novel, though I'd never read one. I felt that life handed me a great subject, gay life, that had scarcely been examined, and I was impelled to record it in all its strange detail.
Edmund White
#73. A great book increases my heartbeat as if I'm prey, melts my insides in anticipation of a first kiss, immerses me in its depths.
Carmen DeSousa
#74. Narrative art, the novel, from Murasaki to Proust, has produced great works of poetry.
Eugenio Montale
#75. I think 'Gatsby' is hobbled, in part, by its status as a Great American Novel. People kind of roll their eyes before they've even opened it, treat it with a 'been there, done that' attitude. I know I did. It took me years to re-open the novel and see how much I'd missed.
Susan Choi
#76. Great wealth could make an enormous difference over the next decade if they sensibly support the scientific elite. Just the elite. Because the elite makes most of the progress. You should worry about people who produce really novel inventions, not pedantic hacks.
James D. Watson
#77. I took a 19th-century Russian novel class in college and have been smitten with Russian literature ever since. Writers like Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Grossman, and Solzhenitsyn tackle the great questions of morality, politics, love, and death.
Anthony Marra
#78. For whom do you cry, my son?" the Great Spirit asked.
"I do not know."
"Yes, you do.
P.J. Parker
#79. When I was at Brown, I wanted to write the great American novel, but I was too scared to take a creative course. I signed up for one, got in, and just didn't have the courage to go. I was a tremendously shy person, almost pathologically shy. The thought of peers critiquing my work - oh, God.
Nathaniel Philbrick
#80. I think the novel is a wonder....it has vitality to an extraordinary degree, and glamour, and a great deal of underlying thought of unusual quality....And as for the sheer writing, it's astonishing. [About The Great Gatsby]
Maxwell Perkins
#81. Oh, how few find time for prayer! There is time for everything else, time to sleep and time to eat, time to read the newspaper and the novel, time to visit friends, time for everything else under the sun, but-no time for prayer, the most important of all things, the one great essential!
Oswald J. Smith
#82. Before I was reading science fiction, I read Hemingway. Farewell to Arms was my first adult novel that said not everything ends well. It was one of those times where reading has meant a great deal to me, in terms of my development - an insight came from that book.
Robert Reed
#83. Poison Pill is a great reading. The novel ranges from Russian oligarchs to the American worlds of drug research and the equity markets, all of it in a mode of high suspense.
Scott Turow
#84. This is not a novel to be tossed aside lightly. It should be thrown with great force.
Dorothy Parker
#85. Dead. Supposedly Suicide. That's how they'll kill Michael too. Make it look like a suicide or an accident of some sort.
H.C. Deboard
#86. It is one of the great blessings of youth, this guiltlessness, the source of gentle sleep and peaceful days.
John Pipkin
#87. [Mark] Twain is pointing at you. You, the reader of the book one hundred and thirty years ago and today. That is what has made it a great American novel and the most widely read book in American Literature around the world today.
Hal Holbrook
#89. People think that they will sit down and produce the great American novel in one sitting. It doesn't work that way. This is a very patient and meticulous work, and you have to do it with joy and love for the process, not for the outcome.
Isabel Allende
#90. What's so great about TV is that you can get an opportunity to tell really rich stories, over the course of so many hours. It's like a novel of this type of medium.
Chris Pratt
#91. Once, I optioned a novel and tried to do a screenplay on it, which was great fun, but I was too respectful. I was only 100 pages into the novel and I had about 90 pages of movie script going. I realized I had a lot to learn.
Gene Hackman
#92. This demonstrates the novel truth - that great events have incalculable consequences.
Victor Hugo
#93. I woke up last night and thought: 'I must call somebody in my next novel Casablanca.' It's such a great name. I don't want to call anybody Fred or Jane or Susan, so when three people get into bed together, you don't know who they are.
Jackie Collins
#94. When I was young, I kept trying to read 'Moby-Dick', and I couldn't get that far into it. And I kept thinking, 'Well, man, if I can't read the great American novel, I could never be a writer.' And this bothered me a great deal.
Nick Tosches
#95. Approaching my second novel was, admittedly, a bit of a struggle. But having an amazing team at Atheneum Books, especially my very patient, brilliant editor Namrata Tripathi, took a stressful situation and turned it into a really great learning experience for me.
John Corey Whaley
#96. It was said by Abraham Lincoln that Ms. Stowe's novel, UNCLE TOM'S CABIN, started the great civil war, the it can be said with certainty that Ms. Brown's novel THE SOUTHERN CROSS reveals the untold story behind the Civil Rights Movement." John Jeter
Alabama Jane Brown
#97. Great. My life has suddenly become a young-adult novel.
R.J. Gonzales
#98. I've learned that the most unbelievable is the most believable.
H.C. Deboard
#99. I'm not looking to write the great American novel, win a Pulitzer or teach history. I write to entertain my readers.
Dorothy Garlock
#100. Today I began the novel that I determined to be great.
Zane Grey
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