Top 100 Life Is A Novel Quotes
#1. I've always felt that life is a novel, and part of it is written for you, and part of it is written by you. It's up to you to write the ending, ultimately.
Lynn Johnston
#2. WWI is a romantic war, in all senses of the word. An entire generation of men and women left the comforts of Edwardian life to travel bravely, and sometimes even jauntily, to almost certain death. At the very least, any story or novel about WWI is about innocence shattered in the face of experience.
Anita Shreve
#3. There is a set of balances and rhythms to a novel that we can't experience in real life. So I think there is a sense in which fiction can rescue history from confusion.
Don DeLillo
#4. True writers know that writing is not something they feel required to do,
or to make a living they must do, it is quite frankly like breathing. Some
can breathe often and fluently, some short breaths, some a long exhale
and for many of us it is the patient steady breathing surrounding life.
Milissa R. Bailey
#5. Hughes' debut novel, At Dawn, follows a former All-American wrestler, and is there any better metaphor for contemporary American life? We're all wrestling, tussling with the economy, no jobs, doing the best we can. Hughes doesn't flinch from the tough existential questions. He embraces them.
Joshua Mohr
#6. War is more like a novel than it is like real life and that is its eternal fascination. It is a thing based on reality but invented, it is a dream made real, all the things that make a novel but not really life.
Gertrude Stein
#7. I don't much live my life as if I was living in a Raymond Chandler novel, which is probably a good thing.
William Gibson
#8. The Ordinary is Extraordinary ..." my motto for life as a writer/Mom/woman
Lisa Barr
#9. I've seen enough cowboys in my life to know I don't want one for a husband."
...Victoria
"Every good man I know is a cowboy."
Scarlett Dunn
#10. The novel is perhaps the highest art form because it so closely resembles life: it is about human relationships. It's technique, page by page, resembles our technique of living day by day
a way of relating.
Joyce Carol Oates
#11. Our lives are a novel being written. We are its author. Every action we encounter and every person we meet has a role and a place in our ultimate story. It is in our control to decide the level of how, who and what impacts us and how large a role we decide to assign each.
Mark W. Boyer
#12. Each story, novel, poem and play presents a vision of the world that illuminates the dark cave of life we stumble through. We can see better where we're going, what sudden drop to avoid, where the cool water is running.
Kareem Abdul-Jabbar
#13. Life in cities is not a spring but a river, or rather, a water main. It progresses like a novel, artificially.
Patrick Kavanagh
#14. The biographical novel is a true and documented story of one human being's journey across the face of the years, transmuted from the raw material of life into the delight and purity of an authentic art form.
Irving Stone
#15. Behind every novel is a greater story of how it came to be published.
T.L. Rese
#16. Writing a complete novel is time consuming, frustrating, nerve wrecking, and most of the time your work is under valued, under appreciated, and taken for granted. So why do authors do it? Because not writing at all, feels far worse.
Carl Henegan
#17. The heart is a place with worm holes made by feelings you aren't supposed to have but do.
Elizabeth Scott
#18. Life is travelled at a pace one decides for themselves
Chandra Sekhar
#20. Writing a novel is just like life ... it's only in the doing of it that I find out what works.
Angela Young
#21. Life must not be a novel that is given to us, but one that is made by us.
Novalis
#22. The difference between a short story and a novel is the difference between an inarticulate pang in your heart compared to the tragedy of your whole life.
Peter Orner
#23. The child who believes there is life after a novel ends.
John Green
#24. I have a slightly contrarian streak as a writer, and one of the things I was interested in was how distilled could I make a life, and how I could cross what is kind of trivialized as a domestic novel with a novel of ideas, a philosophical novel.
Jenny Offill
#25. My life is an open book looking for chapters of love to fill my lonely pages.
-Michelle Carithers
read more A Daughter's Worth-A Novel
Michelle Carithers
#26. A romantic novel is an adult fairy story, repeating the recurring symbols and images which can explain life to a woman and satisfy a powerful need within her. The need to love and be loved is vital to all human beings, but especially to women.
Charlotte Lamb
#27. There is a brilliant novel in all of us. Some imagine it ... others live it. Authors dwell in an auspicious life by having the ability to fuse the two.
Carl Henegan
#28. It is wrong to chide the novel for being fascinated by mysterious coincidences ... but it is right to chide man for being blind to such coincidences in his daily life. For he thereby deprives his life a dimension of beauty.
Milan Kundera
#30. It is a novel kind of supremacy, the best that life can offer, to have as servants by skill those who by nature are our masters.
Baltasar Gracian
#31. Life is like a novel.
Make yours the bestseller!
Suci Hidayat
#32. What is a novel if not a conviction of our fellow-men's existence strong enough to take upon itself a form of imagined life clearer than reality and whose accumulated verisimilitude of selected episodes puts to shame the pride of documentary history.
Joseph Conrad
#33. A Life in Men is a joyful, ambitious novel that is also an adventure traversing three continents, as well as a meditation on love, sex, and, most important, friendship, which can overcome time, distance, and even death.
Bonnie Jo Campbell
#34. Hardy classified A Pair of Blue Eyes among 'Romances and Fantasies'. A favourite of Tennyson, its melancholy treatment of youth, love and death is expressive of late nineteenth-century susceptibilities. Not unnaturally in an early novel, Hardy draws freely on his own life.
Geoffrey Harvey
#35. Novel writing is mostly triage (this now, that later) and obstinacy. Trying something, and when that doesn't work, trying something else. Welcoming clutter Surrendering a good idea for a better one. Knowing you won't find the finish line for a year or two, or five ...
Richard Russo
#36. Precarious, life is. A flying leap. A sweep of hand. A star flung across the night. A lucky catch in this whirling juggling circus act.
From Steam Drills, Treadmills, and Shooting Stars
Rivera Sun
#38. My experience of life is that it is not divided up into genres; it's a horrifying, romantic, tragic, comical, science-fiction cowboy detective novel. You know, with a bit of pornography if you're lucky.
Alan Moore
#39. A story that is more interesting than any novel written by Nicolas Spark; a relationship that has more emotions than any movie made by Karan Johar; and a drama that is more exciting than any TV show...this what we have in our 15 years of marriage and 19 years of togetherness (?)...
Sandhya Jane
#40. All novels must be autobiographical because I am the only material that I know. All of the characters are me. But at the same time, a novel is never autobiographical even if it describes the life of the author. Literary writing is a completely different medium.
John Banville
#41. There is never but one pleasant side to this human life. Like the globe on which we turn, our own rapid rotation is but one day, and a part of this day cannot receive light, so that the other part will not be delivered into darkness.
Jacques-Henri Bernardin De Saint-Pierre
#42. There is no such thing as too ordinary to write about, whether that's life or a scene in a novel. What's interesting to people, whether it's memoir or fiction, is the truth.
Augusten Burroughs
#43. The state of childhood resonates with life inside a fantasy novel. If you have no control over how you spend large chunks of your day, or are at the mercy of flawed giant beings, then the desire to bend the laws of the world by magic is strong and deep.
David Mitchell
#44. A novel is born several times and dies several times, before it takes its final life form.
Manjiri Prabhu
#45. A novel is balanced between a few true impressions and the multitude of false ones that make up most of what we call life.
Saul Bellow
#46. Life is a great novel, discovering your calling is the far better sequel
Carl Henegan
#47. Life in a small town is like an intricately plotted novel, and even though I had read every book in the public library by the time I was fourteen, I found the real people around me saying and doing far more interesting things than did the imaginary book characters.
Maxine Cheshire
#48. Part of the reason I wanted to write a novel was that in fiction I could do something that's difficult to do in real life, which is to dwell on the stark details of the experience without really needing to create that narrative of redemption.
Christina Baker Kline
#49. life rarely finds its exact likeness in a novel, that is hardly fiction's purpose,
Katie Kitamura
#50. The value of a novel is not limited to its depiction of emotions and people akin to those in our own life; it stretches to an ability to describe these far better than we would have been able, to put a finger on perceptions that we recognize as our own, but could not have formulated on our own.
Alain De Botton
#51. Successful fiction does not need to be validated by 'real life'; I cringe whenever a writer is asked how much of a novel is 'real'.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
#52. A novel can enlarge the empathy and imagination of both its author and its reader, and my experience, that sense of enlargement is most intense when I'm transported beyond the narrow limits of my daily life.
Anthony Marra
#53. I feel like humor is a part of life. I don't think it comes through as much in the novels as it does in my head.
Stephenie Meyer
#54. I am persuaded that not a novel in ten thousand is of any use to a child to fit him for life. The most are of use only to unfit him
to blunt his senses and infect him with the writers' poor silly sentiments. Nine out of ten novelists deserve to be prosecuted under an Adulterated Emotions Act.
Storm Jameson
#55. Schopenhauer wrote that to desire immortality is to desire the eternal perpetuation of a great mistake. He was correct.
Michael LaRocca
#56. A novel is always more complicated than it seems at the beginning. Indeed a novel should be more complicated than it seems at the beginning.
John Irving
#57. The detective novel is the art-for-art's-sake of our yawning Philistinism, the classic example of a specialized form of art removed from contact with the life it pretends to build on.
V.S. Pritchett
#58. 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
#59. I think that if the novel's task is to describe where we find ourselves and how we live now, the novelist must take a good, hard look at the most central facts of contemporary life - technology and science.
Richard Powers
#60. Ernest Hemingway said it best: "A novel is just like real life, with the boring parts taken out.
Lee Gimenez
#61. One might say that the novel is the genre that most predisposes one to a profound insight into the tremendous life around us, instead of putting forward one's own tiny ego as the centre of the universe.
Mikhail Sholokhov
#62. More often than not, real life is so rich, complex and unpredictable that it would seem completely implausible in the pages of a novel.
Candice Millard
#63. Life, as the most ancient of all metaphors insists, is a journey; and the travel book, in its deceptive simulation of the journey's fits and starts, rehearses life's own fragmentation. More even than the novel, it embraces the contingency of things.
Jonathan Raban
#64. 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
#65. Life is like reading a third-rate novel written overnight upside down by a crazy drunk.
You're not supposed to try to get it.
Said by E-Wan
Ji-Sang Shin
#66. 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
#67. Perhaps the whole of life is a continuous
interconnecting of miracle,
but we don't always realise it.
Paul Morris Segal
#68. Life is like a friendship, eventually it will end, by conflict or God's hand"
-Sons In The Clouds
Randy Mitchell
#69. I think the novel is the American form because people read it in private, and the only valuable things that happen in America happen in private life, because public life is a dead loss.
David Hare
#70. We the Living is not a novel 'about Soviet Russia.' It is a novel about Man against the State. Its basic theme is the sanctity of human life - using the word 'sanctity' not in a mystical sense, but in the sense of 'supreme value.'
Ayn Rand
#71. Life is like a Ferris wheel, going 'round and 'round in one direction. Some of us are lucky enough to remember each trip around." From: Yesterday - A Novel of Reincarnation
Samyann
#72. Hardly anything is as exciting or as diverse, as strong a confirmation of life and hope and the universe's urge towards creativity, as a lively compost heap or the first draft of a novel.
Margaret Simons
#73. If I have any advantage, maybe, as a writer, it is that I don't think I'm very interesting. I mean, beginning a novel with the last sentence is a pretty plodding way to spend your life.
John Irving
#74. In the traditional urban novel, there is only survival or not. The suburban idea, the conformist idea, that agony can be seen to and cured by doctors or psychoanalysis or self-knowledge is nowhere to be found in the city. Talking is a way of life, but it is not a cure. Same with religion.
Jane Smiley
#75. Every novel presents a slice of life. A noir policier for example presents one slice, one that perhaps addresses social dysfunction or some sort of pathology, while mine present a slice that is more upbeat and affirmative.
Alexander McCall Smith
#76. This is not the proper place to begin speaking of this new passion of Ivan Fyodorovich's, which later affected his whole life: it could all serve as the plot for another story, for a different novel, which I do not even know that I shall ever undertake.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
#77. Of course, that's how life is. A turn of events may seem very small at the time it's happening, but you never really know, do you? How can you?
Tom Xavier
#78. To be true to life, a novel must have an ending that is inevitable given the specific personalities of the characters involved. The novelist must not impose an ending upon them.
Joyce Carol Oates
#79. Our rate of progress is such that an individual human being, of ordinary length of life, will be called on to face novel situations which find no parallel in his past. The fixed person, for the fixed duties, who, in older societies was such a godsend, in the future will be a public danger.
Alfred North Whitehead
#80. 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
#81. Zembla is a site devoted to the life and works of author, translator, and lepidopterist.
Vladimir Nabokov
#82. Life is not like a novel, but a novel can be like life. The best ones always are.
Aidan Chambers
#83. I often wonder if I have fulfilled my purpose. I believe the key to living life to the fullest is to always be recognizing opportunities and following your own path. To enjoy every minute, whether it's writing a novel, giving a speech, or petting the kitties, it's your life.
David Mezzapelle
#84. Sick children inevitably become arrested: You are fated to live out your days as the child you were when diagnosed, the child who believes there is a life after a novel ends.
John Green
#85. The privilege is not writing a novel, it's to have someone read it. When you look at it that way, you realize the responsibility you have to put your very best on the page.
Javier A. Robayo
#86. Life has a time limit. And we are changing all the time. So are our ambitions, desires, and purposes . . . The important thing is to find something that never changes in you.
Fumio Obata
#87. If you love somebody then tell them how you feel dont be scared of their reaction or rejection life is too short. you should take a chance and if things dont work out as you plan dont worry cuz life moves on and true love will be waiting for you again.
Atul Purohit
#88. Those words are from Lynda Barry's novel 'Cruddy.' I've carried them with me for some time. There's a lot in my life I wasn't expecting. One is the realization that I stood at this pulpit and delivered a reading for my own graduation ... 15 years ago. Unexpectedly, I'm old.
Jack Dorsey
#89. I am obsessed with story. I had a late awakening in life. In college was the first time that I understood what you could do with a story and what a good novel is - literary value and subtext and irony and everything.
Shane Carruth
#90. The only reason for the existence of a novel is that it does attempt to represent life.
Henry James
#91. When I'm writing a novel, I'm dealing with a double life. I live in the present at the same time that I live in the past with my characters. It is this that makes a novelist so eccentric and unpleasant.
John Phillips Marquand
#92. Nobody's perfect. They are weak, with ugly hearts, and they quickly turn to jealousy. They try to knock others down. It's so odd . . . In the world we live in, the greater a person is, the more difficult his or her life becomes.
Wataru Watari
#93. This is a work of fiction.
If certain characters resemble people in real life, it is because certain people in real life resemble characters from a novel.
Nobody, therefore, is entitled to feel included in this book.
Nobody, by the same token, to feel excluded.
Fernando Del Paso
#94. I knew it was a risk but what I was after was a novel that is about the feeling that comes with a coincidence in real life - that you feel as if something divine has intervened and has arrived with a message.
Alexander Chee
#95. Like a clock of life on which the seconds race, the page number hangs over the characters in a novel. Where is the reader who has not once lifted to it a fleeting, fearful glance?
Walter Benjamin
#96. In life, if a door closes, all you need to do is move to the window; as long as your whiskers can clear the space you will move through effortlessly. quote by T.G. the Feline Goddess of Everything and Everyone
R. Rose
#97. Life isn't fair," comes the voice of Nana. She has told me that a thousand times. "What matters is how you handle it." I'm going to handle it by winning.
Carolyn Lee Adams
#98. Travel is very useful and it exercises the imagination. All the rest is disappointment and fatigue. Our own journey is entirely imaginary. That is its strength. It goes from life to death. People, animals, cities, things, all are imagined. It's a novel, simply a fictitious narrative.
Louis-Ferdinand Celine
#99. This is a real-life story, Owen," I said. "It's not a mystery novel." In real life, I meant, there was nothing written that the missing father couldn't
John Irving
#100. The object is very clear in the fight against racism; you have reasons why you're opposed to it. But when you're writing a novel, you don't want the reader to come out of it voting yes or no to some question. Life is more complicated than that.
Margaret Atwood
