Novel Reader Quotes

#1. I've always been a little bit more of a novel reader than a short story reader. I think the first books that made me want to be a writer were novels.

Nell Freudenberger

#2. There is something of the ghoul in the page-swallower and of the novel-reader in the stroller through cemeteries.

Regis Debray

#3. A prose that is altogether alive demands something of the reader that the ordinary novel reader is not prepared to give.

T. S. Eliot

#4. I am no indiscriminate novel reader. The mere trash of the common circulating library I hold in the highest contempt.

Jane Austen

#5. So long as you tell a story that falls within the fairly generous boundaries of the suspense novel, you're free to make the novel as good as you can. You're allowed to challenge the reader. You can experiment with voice and style.

Rodman Philbrick

#6. A good novel takes the reader into the heart of another person. It lands you smack into the life and times of someone else.

Mark Rubinstein

#7. A good novel, one which entices the author as much as it beckons the reader.

W.J. Raymond

#8. Another reason I think the novel will survive is that the reader has to work in a novel. In a film, you are presented with someone else's imagination exactly bodied out. The marvelous thing about a novel is that every reader will imagine even the very simplest sentence slightly differently.

John Fowles

#9. A novel requires a certain kind of world-building and also a certain kind of closure, ultimately. Whereas with a short story you have this sense that there are hinges that the reader doesn't see.

Dan Chaon

#10. TV and film are very different media with different requirements. In a TV show, you have actors and fellow writers and directors, who are interpreting your work. With a novel, you only have ink, words and your reader.

Howard Gordon

#11. The reason books get banned, but movies can do almost anything is because the novel is more powerful than a movie. The reader is part of the creation of the story because they must imagine and envision it. There is creation in the act of reading.

Carolyn Mackler

#12. For a musician, smelling a new violin was the equivalent of a reader smelling a new novel. It was a homelike scent that made you realize that the world wasn't a completely terrible place, that there was still beauty that existed.

Brittainy C. Cherry

#13. Well, for people who want to write best sellers, the best advice I can give is to say that the novel has to engage the reader emotionally.

Ken Follett

#14. Identify the moral dilemma driving the novel. the successful novel will haunt a reader because it deals with some ethical or moral dilemma that makes the reader wonder what he or she would do in the protagonist's place.

Rick Riordan

#15. In 'Open City,' there is a passage that any reader of Joyce will immediately recognise as a very close, formal analogue of one the stories in 'Dubliners.' That is because a novel is also a literary conversation.

Teju Cole

#16. Normally, I have a lot of alpha readers on my books. These are people that, once I finish a novel, I let them look at it and give me a reader response.

Brandon Sanderson

#17. For both writer and reader, the novel is a lonely, physically inactive affair. Only the imagination races.

Mary McCarthy

#18. I wonder what it is about a certain novel that ticks the boxes for a reader. I mean, for me, a story can have the most fascinating plot in the world, but if the narrator's voice is dull, then the plot counts for nothing. For me, authorial charm is everything.

Victoria Connelly

#19. A good book changes for you every few years because you are in a different place in your own life. That's a sign of a good novel. Not only will two different readers get something different but so will a single reader at different points in his life.

Alan Lightman

#20. Between Malraux, Balzac, and Montaigne, I choose Montaigne. Montaigne will survive all the others, because the essay, meaning direct communication between the writer and his reader, will outlast the novel, by at least a thousand years.

Gore Vidal

#21. When you write a novel, you never have to be in the service of the reader. My only concern with my books is that the world that's created be as logical and whole as possible.

Hanya Yanagihara

#22. We become merciful, she wrote, when we behave as the "concerned reader of a novel," understanding each person's life as a "complex narrative of human effort in a world full of obstacles.

Martha C. Nussbaum

#23. A novel in which the reader will ask many questions concerning Mayan antiquity.

Peter J. Wetzelaer

#24. Reaching deep into the heart of the reader, Cindy Woodsmall pens a beautifully lyrical story in her debut novel When the Heart Cries.

Tamera Alexander

#25. When a novel has 200,000 words, then it is possible for the reader to experience 200,000 delights, and to turn back to the first page of the book and experience them all over again, perhaps more intensely.

Jane Smiley

#26. I'm my own "ideal reader" in the sense that I write novels that I would want to read.

Steve Erickson

#27. When you are writing a novel, you as the author will wear many hats. You are the writer, reader, and most importantly you are the character. If you can do those things your book will become reality to readers.

LaQuita Cameron

#28. That is the joy of reading fiction: when all is said and done, the novel belongs to the reader and his or her imagination.

Alice Hoffman

#29. A reader should encounter themselves in a novel, I think.

Mohsin Hamid

#30. A reader, encountering a sentence about a barking dog, would have to dwell on why that choice was made at that moment. Everything in a novel is explicitly chosen, whereas some of what a film captures feels incidental, according to the vagaries of photography and sound recording.

Jonathan Lethem

#31. Reading is, at its best, not an escape; it is genuine experience. A novel is not a monologue, but a conversation, a collaboration between writer and reader, an invaluable exchange of human conditions.

Jonathan Evison

#32. In a novel, I think you have a contract with the reader to make the character representative - of a moment in history, a social class ... for instance, I wanted to make the boy in 'A Boy's Own Story' more like other gay men of my generation in their youth and not like me.

Edmund White

#33. It is the test of a novel writer's art that he conceal his snake-in-the-grass; but the reader may be sure that it is always there.

Anthony Trollope

#34. For me, an ideal novel is a dialogue between writer and reader, both a collaborative experience and an intimate exchange of emotions and ideas. The reader just might be the most powerful tool in a writer's arsenal.

Jonathan Evison

#35. It's a rare reader who doesn't go to the novel looking for a kind of encouragement to live.

Norman Rush

#36. In a novel, the relationship between writer and reader is such a pure one.

Howard Gordon

#37. I hope readers will do what I do when I read a novel I like: talk in ways that will illuminate their own lives.

Anna Quindlen

#38. The novelist teaches the reader to comprehend the world as a question. There is wisdom and tolerance in that attitude. In a world built on sacrosanct certainties the novel is dead.

Milan Kundera

#39. A novel without readers is still a novel. It has meaning, since it has had at least one reader, the person who wrote it. Its range of meanings, however, is quite limited. Add readers, add meaning.

Thomas C. Foster

#40. It is as true for the writer as for the reader that any novel worth its ink should be an experience first and foremost - not an essay, not a statement, not an orderly rollout of themes and propositions. All of which is to say: stories, too, are wild things.

David Wroblewski

#41. Every writer is first a member of a community of readers, and the deepest purpose of reading and writing fiction is to sustain a sense of connectedness, to resist existential loneliness; and so a novel deserves a reader's attention only as long as the author sustains the reader's trust.

Jonathan Franzen

#42. A discursive student is almost certain to fall into bad company. Ten minutes with a French novel or a German rationalist have sent a reader away with a fever for life.

Robert Aris Willmott

#43. A novel is a long confession in which you expose your heartaches, complain about all the things that are wrong in the world, then try to put those things right for the sake of the reader, as well as your own well being.

Chloe Thurlow

#44. In a novel, language is your principal tool, you try to build pictures in the mind of the reader. When you write a screenplay, the language is just a transition, the final goal is a picture on the screen, it's the only thing the audience sees.

Philippe Claudel

#45. I have said that each aspect of the novel demands a different quality of the reader. Well, the prophetic aspect demands two qualities: humility and the suspension of the sense of humour.

E. M. Forster

#46. My ideal state as a reader when I'm reading other people is feeling I'm vaguely wasting my time when I'm not reading that novel.

Ian McEwan

#47. The novel is a game or joke shared between author and reader.

Annie Dillard

#48. I want the flashbacks to feel that once you're there they have their own unity, their own kind of atmospheric sensibility; I want the reader to be transported. The novel is a big, complicated, unknowable thing before it's written.

Chang-rae Lee

#49. It would be easier to write a novel without reader input, but I feel the fiction is richer for it.

Piers Anthony

#50. Hemingway used to write an ending to his novel only to delete it, asserting that it made the story stronger because the reader would always be able to intuit the ghost of that final, incorporeal passage.

Jessica Knoll

#51. Proust is a hero of mine. I read 'A la recherche' in one go, and I'm a very slow reader. It had an astonishing impact, reading it on my own and being my main company. I think Proust is the most intelligent person to ever have written a novel.

Edward St. Aubyn

#52. Like a Chinese box, the world of the novel contained smaller worlds, and inside those were yet smaller worlds. Together, these worlds made up a single universe, and the universe waited there in the book to be discovered by the reader.

Haruki Murakami

#53. Writing does not exist unless there is someone to read it, and each reader will take something different from a novel, from a chapter, from a line.

Claire Fuller

#54. P.O. Box Love is a wonderfully engrossing and romantic novel that takes the reader from Milan to New York and back again through the letters Federico and Emma mail to each other. Paola Calvetti's book will captivate your mind and steal your heart."

Isabella Rossellini

Paola Calvetti

#55. As thoroughly as mankind has killed God, the reader has despatched the author.

Johnny Rich

#56. I believe the most important thing you can do in any kind of novel is to make your reader want to go on with it and want to know what happens next.

Ruth Rendell

#57. 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

#58. I had thought for years, probably 30 or 40 years, that it would be a lot of fun to try my hand at a classic English mystery novel ... I love that form very much because the reader is so familiar with all of the types of characters that are in there that they already identify with the book.

Alan Bradley

#59. Treading water, a little dog-paddling - it's a lot like writing a novel, Clark," the dump reader told his former student. "It feels like you're going a long way, because it's a lot of work, but you're basically covering old ground - you're hanging out in familiar territory.

John Irving

#60. The suspense of a novel is not only in the reader, but in the novelist, who is intensely curious about what will happen to the hero.

Mary McCarthy

#61. This is the paradoxical responsibility of the reader: to replenish the strangeness of the novel by making connections with the familiar.

Norma Field

#62. 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

#63. The worst kind of novel is one that blames other people for the racial problem in order to make the reader feel good about himself. As if it's only rich white people or Republicans or conservatives who have this disease.

George Pelecanos

#64. A novel has to entertain
that's the contract with the reader: you give me ten hours and I'll give you a reason to turn every page.

Barbara Kingsolver

#65. The author always knows more than the reader does at the start of a novel, and gradually, they share that knowledge with the reader - that's storytelling.

Simon Toyne

#66. A novel is a conversation between a reader and a writer.

John Green

#67. Mysteries include so many things: the noir novel, espionage novel, private eye novels, thrillers, police procedurals. But the pure detective story is where there's a detective and a criminal who's committed a murder and leaves clues for the detective and the careful reader to find.

Otto Penzler

#68. Every reader re-creates a novel - in their own imagination, anyway. It's only entirely the writer's when nobody else has read it.

Susan Hill

#69. Each and every novel is a world outside the world - for a reader to visit, for comfort, consolation, escape, or challenge.

Joshua Cohen

#70. I am an impatient, temperamental reader. Anything long-winded, high-flown or gushing irritates me, so does everything that is vague and indistinct, in fact anything that unnecessarily holds the reader up, whether in a novel, a biography or an intellectual argument.

Stefan Zweig

#71. 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

#72. Reading is a private act, private even from the person who wrote the book. Once the novel is out there, the author is beside the point. The reader and the book have their own relationship now, and should be left alone to work things out for themselves.

Ann Patchett

#73. As a writer, you must know what promise your story or novel makes. Your reader will know.

Nancy Kress

#74. Maggie Shipstead takes hold of the reader and doesn't let go. Astonish Me is a haunting, powerful novel.

Dani Shapiro

#75. The problem lies not with the characters within the novel, but with the reader itself.

Vladimir Nabokov

#76. I sometimes feel that my goal as a novelist would be to write a novel in which the language was so transparent that the reader would forget that language was the medium of understanding. Of course that's not possible, but it's some sort of idealized goal.

Paul Auster

#77. The most beautiful novel is the one that starts with a sentence wholly unexpected by the reader who has lived through our storms and norms, and who might once have been the cause of our changing moods.

Ahlam Mosteghanemi

#78. I define a thriller as a big-stakes, multiple-viewpoint novel involving suspense, action, and mystery, in which the reader doesn't know everything but usually knows more than any single character.

F. Paul Wilson

#79. Horror and supernatural novels give you a lot of what you look for in a crime novel, just with a twist that was very fresh for me as a reader.

Michael Koryta

#80. One key to the distinction between mystery and suspense writing involves the relative positions of hero and reader. In the ideal mystery novel, the readers is two steps behind the detective ... The ideal suspense reader, on the other hand, is two steps ahead of the hero.

Carolyn Wheat

#81. Writing a novel is an intense and lonely business, but you have the reward at the end of a very direct dialogue between you and the reader.

Neil Cross

#82. People in a novel can be understood completely by the reader, if the novelist can be understood completely by the reader, if the novelist wishes; their inner as well as their outer life can be exposed.

E. M. Forster

#83. Rather than a teaching tool, I think a novel is more of a witnessing entity. A witnessing entity? What is that? I just want the reader to step in and experience it as a story.

Lorrie Moore

#84. [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

#85. I am not sure how a novel changes the world. I think it alters a reader's perspective by asking him or her to see the world through another consciousness. That can perhaps cause people to see their own lives differently. Or just give a single day, a single moment, a slightly different sheen.

Edan Lepucki

#86. A novel, for me, relies on my imagination to inspire your (the reader's) imagination. It is not all there for you. My novels or my stories come to me visually. I use words to translate the novel I see inside my head into words that I hope will create a movie inside your head.

Jay Neugeboren

#87. Whenever you have two characters in a book, whether it's a novel or nonfiction, you run the risk that the reader is going to like one more than the other. They're going to read one chapter and say, 'I can't wait to get back to the other guy.'

Mitch Albom

#88. With a novel, you're the director and the screenwriter and everything else, except that you have to write it knowing it will all be performed inside the head of the reader. So it's a difficult and lonely task.

Jason Henderson

#89. I'm an avid reader myself, and what any one reader accesses at any one time is very powerful and personal to them. Clearly you can't even begin to touch that. A novel is a singular vision, and then a myriad of readers have their own experience of that.

Darren Boyd

#90. A novel need not impart information or inform. It must seduce & snare the reader with feelings & break the reader's heart.

Mark Rubinstein

#91. Short fiction is the medium I love the most, because it requires that I bring everything I've learned about poetry - the concision, the ability to say something as vividly as possible - but also the ability to create a narrative that, though lacking a novel's length, satisfies the reader.

Ron Rash

#92. Merrick belonged to that class of reader who was able to forget with amazing ease the hand moving the characters behind the scenes of the novel.

Felix J. Palma

#93. To write a novel is to dream while awake, then express the dream to the reader in an absorbing way. The road leading from the writer's inner world to the readers' is paved with prose.

Alan Joshua

#94. The novel is an event in consciousness. Our aim isn't to copy actuality, but to modify and recreate our sense of it. The novelist is inviting the reader to watch a performance in his own brain.

George W. Buchanan

#95. A novel is like a bow, and the violin that produces the sound is the reader's soul.

Stendhal

#96. Every novel is an equal collaboration between the writer and the reader and it is the only place in the world where two strangers can meet on terms of absolute intimacy.

Paul Auster

#97. The job of the novel is to be true to the confusion, but not so confusing that you turn the reader off.

Nicholson Baker

#98. It's a fantastic privilege to spend three or four hundred pages with a reader. You have time to go into certain questions that are painful or difficult or complicated. That's one thing that appeals to me very much about the novel form.

Anne Michaels

#99. I read a lot. I am an inveterate reader. I always have a novel going.

Tom Sizemore

#100. A novel is a conversation starter, and if the author isn't there for the after-party, both the writer and the reader are missing a lot.

Maggie Stiefvater