Top 100 Literature Novel Quotes
#1. No one says a novel has to be one thing. It can be anything it wants to be, a vaudeville show, the six o'clock news, the mumblings of wild men saddled by demons.
Ishmael Reed
#3. Deprived of their newspapers or a novel, reading-addicts will fall back onto cookery books, on the literature which is wrapped around bottles of patent medicine, on those instructions for keeping the contents crisp which are printed on the outside of boxes of breakfast cereals. On anything.
Aldous Huxley
#4. I grew up in a working-class Catholic family in south Louisiana. I went to a state university. I taught literature, wrote a novel that was the novel I wanted to write, and got a couple of good reviews but no real traction. I had no idea how to get a job in TV.
Nic Pizzolatto
#5. At university, one of my areas of study was Victorian literature, so I decided to see if I could write a novel as carefully planned and constructed as those of George Eliot, but with the narrative energy of Dickens.
Michel Faber
#6. I think Henry Miller has had huge influence not because he wrote about sex, but because the memoir or the nonfiction novel has become such a monumental force in American publishing, if not in literature.
Leslie Fiedler
#7. All the great novels are about obsession and people who are obsessed.
Marty Rubin
#8. The idea that a student can write a sonnet or a novel without having a sound understanding about its history, and where it fits into literature as a whole, seems to me to be manifestly daft.
Nicholas Royle
#9. How Are We to Live is a collection of short stories, not a novel. This in itself is a disappointment. It seems to diminish the book's authority, making the author seem like somebody who is just hanging on to the gates of Literature, rather than safely settled inside.
Alice Munro
#10. The longest piece of literature I've read lately was a tattoo on this biker I picked up last night. It said, If you're this close, you've gotta suck it.
Eric Arvin
#11. As it is I'm a dated novelist, whom hardly anybody reads, or if they do, most of them don't understand what I am on about. Certainly I wish I had never written Voss, which is going to be everybody's albatross.
Patrick White
#12. To have all those noble Romans alive before me, and walking in and out for my entertainment, instead of being the stern taskmasters they had been at school, was a most novel and delightful effect.
Charles Dickens
#13. It is quite impossible to write a worth-while novel about a Jew or a Gentile or a Homosexual, for people refuse, unhappily, to function in so neat and one-dimensional a fashion.
James Baldwin
#14. I was fortunate that Yale has a very open and creative law school. I took many courses outside the law school, and every semester, the students had a literature reading group. I was asked to lead one on 'Dante and the Concept of Justice,' and it was around that time that I began writing the novel.
Matthew Pearl
#15. Seasons didn't come behind the nicotine-stained walls of Mountain City's prison, so Harm always imagined it spring--the locust trees clustered with shaggy white blooms, the wet woods flecked with bloodroot, and wild roses and honeysuckle flashing white among the chestnuts on the mountainsides...
Sharyn McCrumb
#16. The atmosphere of orthodoxy is always damaging to prose, and above all it is completely ruinous to the novel, the most anarchical of all forms of literature.
George Orwell
#17. It was Crabcalf who, surrounded and walled in by the hundreds of unsold copies of his ill-fated novel, felt that he if anyone should be the judge not only of literature, but all that went on behind the sordid scenes.
Mervyn Peake
#18. I attempt to write a good novel. Whether it is literature or not is something that will be decided by the ages, not by me and not by a pack of critics around the globe.
Elizabeth George
#19. 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
#20. We all have a book in us. The first step is recognising this. Writing it is a whole new journey.
Kathryn Joyce
#21. To me, cinema is cinema. Cinema is one big tree with many branches. The same as literature. In literature, you don't just say, 'Oh, I bought some literature.' No, you say, 'I bought a novel' by so-and-so, or a book of essays by so-and-so.
Jonas Mekas
#22. The only obligation to which in advance we may hold a novel, without incurring the accusation of being arbitrary, is that it be interesting.
Henry James
#23. It's not that war crimes stop as soon as a novel about them is published. Literature operates slowly, it is always inching toward bliss, never quite getting there.
Aleksandar Hemon
#24. Fitzgerald has charm. It's a silly word, but it's an exact word for me. I like 'The Great Gatsby' and it's sad, gay nostalgia.
Truman Capote
#25. 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
#26. I wanted to discuss my life with him not as a patient talking to an analyst but as if we were two literary critics discussing a novel ... I had a literature rather than a personality, a set of fictions about myself.
Anatole Broyard
#27. Get thee to the novel! - the novel, that word-woven submarine, piloted by intimation and intuition, that will dive you to the deeps of the heart's maelstrom.
Cynthia Ozick
#28. The sign of a good novel is what it can cause its reader to see, even if this lies beyond the author's own vision.
John Gaddis
#29. Isn't post-modernism really one big cover-up for the failure of the French to write a truly interesting novel ever since a sports car ate Albert Camus?
John Leonard
#30. Life really is a story, and every story comes to an end. At the same time, it seems we all leave in the middle of our own stories. It's who we become that gives the story body, form and meaning.
Melinda West Seifert
#31. It's a lucky man who leaves early from life's banquet, before he's drained to the dregs his goblet - full of wine; yes, it's a lucky man who has not read life's novel to the end, but has been wise enough to part with it abruptly - like me with my Onegin.
Alexander Pushkin
#32. ...Sigerius realized that every academic looked like every other academic."
- Bonita Avenue, p.49
Peter Buwalda
#33. Winner of the "Booker of Bookers," Midnight's Children is the novel that can be said to have done for Indian literature what One Hundred Years of Solitude did for the literature of the Americas, exciting a boom whose echoes have yet to fade.
Salman Rushdie
#34. For a writer to put his own intellectual musings, which he might sell for a low price as essays, into the mouths of artificially constructed characters which are more remunerative when issued as people in a novel is good economics, perhaps, but does not make literature.
Ernest Hemingway,
#35. The rise to prominence of the Saudi novel in Arabic is the great man-bites-dog of recent world literature. Saudi Arabia is a country without a free press, where European styles and forms are distrusted and where the female half of the population became literate only in this generation.
James Buchan
#36. 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
#37. Everybody knows, nobody's talking - from LIE
debut novel coming September 1st from St. Martin's Press
Caroline Bock
#38. 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
#39. That's sounds right. Another $5,000 went to dress up the Little League park where he had played so many games. Seems like he paid off the MORTAGE on his parents' home, which wasn't that much.
John Grisham
#40. I have often been mildly amused when I think that the great American novel was not written about New England or Chicago. It was written about a white whale in the South Pacific.
James A. Michener
#41. People recover differently. Some change cities, some fall in love and some begin writing.
Kanza Javed
#43. We work all our lives to be who we become. And, it's who we become that determines what becomes of us.
Melinda West Seifert
#44. I don't believe in writer's block. Who can function working seven days a week at at job. It's the same with writing. Take a break and let the words come to you. It rarely comes if you force it and if it does, you'll probably regret what you wrote down on paper.
Lillian R. Melendez
#45. Real literature was about psychological, emotional, and social truth as demonstrated by the actions and reflections of its protagonists; the novel was about character developed over time.
Julian Barnes
#46. What great literature does best is to show us those moments which make life worth living.
Marty Rubin
#47. I can imagine her memories of the novel, or, more likely, of who she was and how she felt when reading it.
Rabih Alameddine
#48. I'm a sucker for any band named after a work of literature. Los de Abajo take their name from Mariano Azuela's famous novel 'The Underdogs,' and that says a lot about who they are and the music they make.
Daniel Alarcon
#49. A novel must be judged on its merits, not on how hard the journey was to write it.
Johnny Rich
#51. If a novel's salient aim is virtue, I want to throw it against the wall.
Cynthia Ozick
#52. I was once a graduate student in Victorian literature, and I believe as the Victorian novelists did, that a novel isn't simply a vehicle for private expression, but that it also exists for social examination. I firmly believe this.
Margaret Atwood
#53. A cardinal principle of good fiction [is]: the theme and the plot of a novel must be integrated - as thoroughly integrated as mind and body or thought and action in a rational view of man.
Ayn Rand
#54. 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
#55. Experience, then, was something that enabled you to do nothing with a clear conscience. Experience was an overrated quality.
Nick Hornby
#56. Human beings, you see, do absolutely two primary things. We see like and unlike. Like becomes, in literature, simile and metaphor. Unlike becomes uniqueness and difference, from which I believe, the novel is born.
Salman Rushdie
#57. First of all, the novel should be a critique of the novels that have come before it in a language that broadens the audience of American literature. Second, it's really got to be invested in a number of what-if questions.
Kiese Laymon
#58. I've only been to jail a few times, but in several different countries, at that. No, I've only been to jail a few times. But I still claim the ability to write a "serious" novel.
Roman Payne
#59. The novel succeeds on terms exclusive to literature. A good film succeeds on terms exclusive to the cinema. That's why so many bad novels can become good movies, like 'Jaws' or 'The Godfather.'
Alexander Payne
#60. What makes literature interesting is that it does not survive its translation. The characters in a novel are made out of the sentences. That's what their substance is.
Jonathan Miller
#61. I know for a fact that - it's just the way our biases work now in the industry of literature, but certainly a short story collection does not receive the same kind of attention as a novel.
Junot Diaz
#62. Looking back on my life, I sigh. The caprice of youth goes with the wind, I've no regrets.
Roman Payne
#63. Maybe these dreams of ours just floats away. Here we go again ... changin' face.
Randolph Randy Camp
#64. 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
#65. This was a crime of passion, but unlike most crimes of passion, it had been meticulously and diabolically well-planned.
Mark Zero
#66. When I'm writing I don't want anyone else in the room - including myself.
Jonathan Franzen
#67. When death becomes an escape, when it becomes attractive, the purpose of life is fulfilled. To teach one it's futility, it's worthlessness, that is the purpose of life. Incongruously, its value lies in having imparted that lesson.
Bhanggi
Faiqa Mansab
#68. Horse racing is really much more intimidating than anything having to do with literature. When I had horses at the racetrack, I would wake up in terror in a way that I would never wake up while working on a novel.
Jane Smiley
#69. How I would enjoy being told the novel is dead. How liberating to work in the margins, outside a central perception. You are the ghoul of literature.
Don DeLillo
#70. If possible, I'd like to avoid that kind of literary burnout. My idea of literature is something more spontaneous, more cohesive, something with a kind of natural, positive vitality. For me, writing a novel is like climbing a steep mountain, struggling up the face of the cliff,
Haruki Murakami
#71. 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
#72. 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
#73. Anybody can write a three-volume novel. It merely requires a complete ignorance of both life and literature.
Oscar Wilde
#74. If I were a writer, how I would enjoy being told the novel is dead. How liberating to work in the margins, outside a central perception. You are the ghoul of literature. Lovely.
Don DeLillo
#75. For better or worse, whether it is a sign of aesthetic complexity or of intellectual indecision, this novel [Frankenstein] offers equally fertile ground to those readers who like their meanings ambiguous and indeterminate and to those who prefer to discern a deeply important doctrine.
Richard T. Nash
#76. Everyone makes mistakes, but only a few could forgive. An eye for an eye will make us all blind.
Morra Quatro
#77. Arabs don't do crime fiction. I read crime fiction and I read Arabic literature, and I wish this was a novel I could have read in Arabic.
Elliott Colla
#78. People wonder why the novel is the most popular form of literature; people wonder why it is read more than books of science or books of metaphysics. The reason is very simple; it is merely that the novel is more true than they are.
G.K. Chesterton
#79. There isn't, even now, a great tradition of novel-writing in Afghanistan. Most of the literature is in the form of poetry.
Khaled Hosseini
#80. Not writing is never an option. This is not words of advice. It's just literally never an option!
Lillian R. Melendez
#81. And what is gossip anyway?Just fragments of sad accounts, maneuvered and mutilated year after year for our sinful pleasure.
Kanza Javed
#82. A good novel is an indivisible sum: every scene, sequence and passage of a good novel has to involve, contribute to and advance all three of its major attributes: theme, plot, characterization.
Ayn Rand
#83. She could have happily lived inside any nineteenth century novel.
Kate Atkinson
#84. The characters act for reasons that they can't control and, as readers, we have to believe in their motivations, their sense of choice and in the reality of their suffering, even though, deep down, we know it's all just puppetry on the part of the writer.
Johnny Rich
#85. A poem (surely someone has said this before) is a one-night stand, a short story a love affair, and a novel a marriage.
Erica Jong
#86. Besides being witty and funny and maybe the best novel ever written, it's also the most perfect romance in all of literature and nothing in life can ever measure up, so I spend my life limping in its shadow.
Shannon Hale
#87. This is the kind of detail that is forbidden in literature; in a book, no one would dare combine a full moon with Frank Sinatra. The problem with fiction is that it must seem credible, while reality seldom is.
Isabel Allende
#88. 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
#89. Although by 1851 tales of adventure had begun to seem antiquated, they had rendered a large service to the course of literature: they had removed the stigma, for the most part, from the word novel.
Carl Clinton Van Doren
#90. 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
#91. Twentieth-century Russian literature has produced nothing special except perhaps one novel and two stories by Andrei Platonov, who ended his days sweeping streets.
Joseph Brodsky
#92. I don't see myself as a very important person. But I was the second woman to write a novel in Iran, and I have written most of the novels about Iranian women. In this way, maybe I have a good place in Iranian literature.
Shahrnush Parsipur
#93. I thought you'd be interested in these things as a government man. Ain't you mixed up in the prices of things we eat or something? Ain't that it? Making them more costly or something. Making the grits cost more and the grunts less?
Ernest Hemingway,
#94. [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
#95. I love to read about anger. A "feel bad" book always makes me feel good. And no other novel in the history of literature is more depressing than Christina Stead's The Man Who Loved Children.
John Waters
#96. I was determined that in fiction anyway two men should fall in love and remain in it for the ever and ever that fiction allows.
E. M. Forster
#97. One cannot read a novel without ascribing to the heroine the traits of the one we love.
Alain De Botton
#98. People use each other as markers for what's real, so you can't be alone anymore. Solitude draws suspicions.
pg. 163
S.K. Kalsi
#99. I've never met anyone as kind as you are, except me Mum, o' course." --Benjamin Trimmel to Lady Alexandra.
Lisa M. Prysock
#100. 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
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