Top 43 Greatest Novel Quotes
#1. Most writers battle with periods of being blocked; it's almost an occupational hazard. But in the writing of his last and greatest novel, 'A Passage to India,' E. M. Forster got stuck for nine years.
Damon Galgut
#2. I think one of the keys to better writing is releasing all of your ideas and to not be afraid. Dream big. This could be the greatest novel in the world you know.
Adora Svitak
#3. With its vastly complicated plot and its immense cast of characters swirling around the case of Jarndyce vs. Jarndyce that has been grinding away in the Court of Chancery for decades, 'Bleak House' is, for many readers, Dickens's greatest novel.
Robert Gottlieb
#4. I would never re-write you. You are by far my most complete and greatest novel.
Virginia Woolf
#5. Say, you told me you thought Les Miserables was the greatest novel ever written. I think Vanity Fair is the greatest. Let's fight. - Joe Willard
Maud Hart Lovelace
#6. 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
#7. Activism is my rent for living on the planet.
Alice Walker
#8. Steve Coogan picks up enough to lecture an interviewer: This is a postmodern novel before there was any modernism to be post about. Later it's claimed that Tristram Shandy was No. 8 on the Observer's list of the greatest novels, which cheers everyone until they discover the list was chronological.
Roger Ebert
#9. The greatest multiplex in the universe is inside your mind, and the only ticket you need is a good, well-written novel.
Carlos Ruiz Zafon
#10. Yes, there's a relaying of internal states that only a novel can achieve. In my view, the novel is one of Europe's greatest gifts to the world. America and Africa collaborated to give the world jazz. We'll call it even.
Teju Cole
#11. Whatever you bind on earth is already bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth is already loosed in heaven. Matthew 16:19
Beth Moore
#12. A person can have the greatest idea in the world - completely different and novel - but if that person can't convince enough other people, it doesn't matter,
Gregory Berns
#13. One of the greatest challenges is not going to the mattresses with someone who criticizes your novel.
Elizabeth Ann Patterson
#14. One of the things I've been most excited by is U.S. television drama. For my money, it's some of the greatest narrative art of our time. Each series is like a 19th-century Russian novel: you need to do a lot of work in the first few episodes, just as you do in the first 50-60 pages of those books.
Kevin Barry
#15. My goal is always transformation. I love to watch people transform their lives, which includes their inner world and their outer world.
Debbie Ford
#16. I am a master of fiction. I am also the greatest crime writer who ever lived. I am to the crime novel in specific what Tolstoy is to the Russian novel and what Beethoven is to music.
James Ellroy
#18. As always with the greatest works, the novel is so many-sided that over time it mirrors back the shifting concerns of those who read it, and that is the definition of a classic.
Carl F. Hovde
#19. You want the greatest trick for writing a novel? Here it is: imagine urgently whispering your story into one person's ear - and only one. This one visualization will clarify every word choice you make.
Julianna Baggott
#20. Love is the greatest unseen force in the universe." - Cole
Missouri Vaun
#21. I would have to say the novel 'War and Peace' influenced me more than any other book. This greatest of novels demonstrated to me the enormous power of literature and fired me up with a desire to become a writer, to participate in what I considered then to be the greatest of all endeavors.
Douglas Preston
#22. I'm very conscious that I want the dance audience to respond and respect what I'm doing, so I'm always very true to the music and I honour the music in the way I see it - I don't mess around with the music.
Matthew Bourne
#23. 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
#24. Max Brooks' novel 'World War Z' is one of the greatest zombie stories ever written, partly for reasons that make it basically unfilmable.
Annalee Newitz
#25. If you live life on your own terms, people will definitely not understand you
Josh Stern
#26. The nature of light is a subject of no material importance to the concerns of life or to the practice of the arts, but it is in many other respects extremely interesting.
Thomas Young
#27. Man who rules the mob only as long as he says what the mob wants him to say.
Ayn Rand
#28. Whatever you do, you'll never kill my love. I love you! It's only now that I realize I can't imagine my life without you
Natalie Ansard
#29. Each novel is harder than its predecessor because I must work harder at not repeating myself. However, I enjoy the challenge. This is the greatest job in the world.
Jonathan Kellerman
#30. The other Clans will soon arrive. The greatest times of our family are before us. And so are the darkest.
P.J. Parker
#31. Autism. STOP sugar coating it to make it easier to swallow. I don't have a superpower, sparkles or rainbows. I'm me. I need to be accepted for being me. In the world I live in, I have a disability
Tina J. Richardson
#32. Since I can't write the greatest American novel, I'm going to write the longest American novel.
Thomas Steinbeck
#33. 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
#34. I am a writer who has written about the life of my people, the character of my people. What I can say is that the greatest hero of the Brazilian novel is the Brazilian people.
Jorge Amado
#35. But perhaps the greatest escapism of all is to take refuge in the domesticity of the past, the home that history and literature become, avoiding the one moment of time in which we are not at home, yet have to live: the present.
Tim Parks
#36. The key to longevity is to learn every aspect of music that you can.
Prince
#37. I placed my new novel, 'The Book of Lost Fragrances', in Paris, knowing it would be a challenge. But the book belonged in the city that is one of the greatest perfume capitals of the world and has been since for more than three centuries.
M.J. Rose
#38. The bourgeois novel is the greatest enemy of truth and honesty that was ever invented.
J.G. Ballard
#39. The fictional world seems larger, seems to have more dimension and richness when, for example, the protagonist from one novel you've read has a cameo role in another. I think that recognition is a very, very powerful phenomenon; it is one of the deepest and greatest pleasures of reading.
Paul Harding
#40. I bring the petals to my nose and breathe deeply. "Where did it come from?"
Seth smiles. "A garden."
"A garden?" I repeat, raising an eyebrow.
He laughs.
"You think you're so clever," I mutter. "It must be nice, conjuring up whatever you want whenever you want it."
"It has it's perks.
Katie Klein
#41. To this point it probably looks like I am setting this up as a slam-dunk case for ambulating while working, and getting ready to lambaste treadmill-resistant managers as insensitive and tragically shortsighted knuckle draggers. Well, they are.
Neal Stephenson
#42. And, perhaps most importantly, regional conflicts will again and again confront us with a cruel choice between costly engagement and costly indifference.
Lord Robertson
#43. For those women sin against God when they rub their skin with ointments, stain their cheeks with rouge, and make their eyes prominent with antimony. To them, I suppose, the artistic skill of God is displeasing!
Tertullian
