Novel That Quotes

#1. What could be more boring than a novel that tells you how to think about everything that happens in it?

Jonathan Dee

#2. Alec Nevala-Lee comes roaring out of the gate with a novel that's as thrilling as it is thought-provoking, as unexpected as it is erudite. The Icon Thief is a wild ride through a fascinating and morally complex world, a puzzle Duchamp himself would have applauded. Bravo.

Jesse Kellerman

#3. A novel that features real people is complicated, but in the end, that extra challenge is all for the good.

Rick Bass

#4. Just as art brings you to another place, so does religion - and to ask questions of factuality tends to reduce both. If you say you were inspired by a novel, that implies that your book is a work of fiction.

Yann Martel

#5. 'Out' was my real breakthrough, the novel that became a hit in Japan and sold a lot of books, so it was sort of an obvious choice for being the first book to be translated into English.

Natsuo Kirino

#6. Instead of making myself write the book I ought to write, the novel that was expected of me, I conjured up the book I myself would have liked to read, the sort by an unknown writer, from another age and another country, discovered in an attic. ITALO CALVINO

Salman Rushdie

#7. William Goldman's Marathon Man was a novel that taught me about suspense. I was maybe 16 years old when I read it and I remember thinking, "You could put a gun to my head and I wouldn't put this book down." I loved that feeling - and want to give it others.

Harlan Coben

#8. I'd never really considered doing young-adult novels, but one of the things that a friend pointed out to me is that I've actually had a teenage character in almost every adult novel that I've written.

Michelle Gagnon

#9. Writing a novel is so hard, and there are so many problems that the last thing you're thinking about is adapting this mess you have on your hands as a movie. You just want to get it to work as a novel. That's your main focus.

Maria Semple

#10. Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (whose mother died ten days after she was born) wrote a novel that anticipates Semmelweis's discovery and serves as a parable for the destructive power of decaying matter.

Laura Mullen

#11. 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

#12. In the case of my book, I don't think it's really the coming-out gay novel that everyone really needed, even though it was received as such. The boy is too creepy, he betrays his teacher, the only adult man with whom he's enjoyed a sexual experience, etc.

Edmund White

#13. If one book's done this well, you want to write another one that does just as well. There's that horror of the second novel that doesn't match up.

Mark Haddon

#14. I always write these movies that are far too big for any paying customer to sit down and watch from beginning to end, and so I always have this big novel that I have to adapt into a movie as I go.

Quentin Tarantino

#15. It reminded him of a science fiction novel that he'd read once; in it, the characters had a tendency to say ominously that 'winter was coming' and Sin had to fight the urge to say the words out loud with the exact same ominous feeling behind.

Ais

#16. That's right, folks. This is the sort of novel that starts with a fucking Venn diagram. Buckle up, bitches.

Robert Kroese

#17. a novel that does its own stunts

Tom Robbins

#18. I think instead writers and publishers and readers need to go to the places where people are, and make the argument that there is great value to the quiet, contemplative process of reading a novel, that reading great books carefully offers pleasures and consolations that no iPad app ever can.

John Green

#19. 'The One-Eyed Man' is a novel that was one I never intended to write.

L.E. Modesitt Jr.

#20. What is either a picture or a novel that is not character?

Henry James

#21. Only one novel is a novel: that is a successful novel.

William Golding

#22. What's the challenge in writing a novel that few people will read? I'm more than happy writing what I do and have no plans to change that.

Nicholas Sparks

#23. 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

#24. The main thing about the novel that is totally fascinating: It's not possessed by the writer; it's possessed by the reader.

Jane Smiley

#25. I've always been a fan of the 19th century novel, of the novel that is plotted, character-driven, and where the passage of time is almost as central to the novel as a major minor character, the passage of time and its effect on the characters in the story.

John Irving

#26. My English teachers gave me a copy of Atwood's 'The Handmaid's Tale' when I left high school, which has always been very special to me - it was the novel that introduced me to dystopian fiction. I'm also influenced by Edgar Allan Poe, Dickens, John Wyndham and Middle English dream-visions.

Samantha Shannon

#27. I've never made an outline for any novel that I've written. Never.

Don DeLillo

#28. You never figure out how to write a novel; you just learn how to write the novel that you're on.

Amy Cuddy

#29. I started writing novels by not thinking about actually writing a whole novel - that felt altogether too daunting. I thought out a rough idea, then wrote chapter by chapter, and then by the time I'd hit 40,000 words, it was a challenge just to see if I could get to the end.

Jojo Moyes

#30. Of course I planned to write the Great American Novel; that lasted about a week, at which point I decided I had nothing to say that could possibly qualify. So I wrote a romance instead.

Jasmine Cresswell

#31. I'm a big fan of Elmore Leonard, and I've read Ian Rankin, Christopher Brookmyre and so on. But I'd never read a crime novel that made me feel emotional at the end.

John Gordon Sinclair

#32. As to the strangest claim in the novel: that only 10 percent of the cells in our body are human (and the rest are bacteria and parasites). This is true! There is a wonderful book exploring this topic that is as horrific as it is humorous, Human Wildlife by Dr. Robert Buckman.

James Rollins

#33. Every once in a while you come across a novel that reminds you why you think you enjoy reading in the first place.

Graham Parke

#34. Your case gives me new hope," I said to him. "With me, more and more often I happen to pick up a novel that has just appeared and I find myself reading the same book I have read a hundred times.

Italo Calvino

#35. I doubt whether there would be many readers for a post-holocaust novel that was concerned with the hero's desperate search for a mite. But alas for the world if the mites and their diminutive allies failed to prosper!

Richard Fortey

#36. History is a novel that has been lived, a novel is history that could have been.

Edmond De Goncourt

#37. Stuart Rojstaczer writes with enormous wit, style and empathy, and The Mathematician's Shiva is a big-hearted, rollickingly funny novel that's impossible to put down. A tremendous debut.

Molly Antopol

#38. I steer clear of any novel that gets billed as a 'meditation.'

Maria Semple

#39. Every novel is like this, desperation, a frustrated attempt to save something of the past. Except that it still has not been established whether it is the novel that prevents man from forgetting himself or the impossibility of forgetfulness that makes him write novels.

Jose Saramago

#40. I remembered reading in a hard-boiled detective novel that if you drink in the same place two nights in a row, the bartender and waiters will remember your face.

Ryu Murakami

#41. I love a novel that's funny, and The Taxman Cometh is very funny, delightfully well-written, yet with a serious message about how government bureaucracy affects us all. Read. Enjoy. And if a comparison to Catch 22 pops into your mind, that's not surprising.

Marvin Kalb

#42. Writing a novel that crosses genres is a risk, but one well worth taking.

Chet Williamson

#43. I feel like they are two different things, and when I write books, they're just books. If they can be movies that's okay. But I would write a novel that couldn't be a film.

Augusten Burroughs

#44. Whenever I read a contemporary literary novel that describes the world we're living in, I wait for the science fiction tools to come out. Because they have to - the material demands it.

William Gibson

#45. Somehow, you can achieve a directness in the novel that you can't get anywhere else.

Chad Harbach

#46. I read all of the nonfiction that I could find on Chechnya, and all the while, I was searching for a novel that was set there. I couldn't find a single novel written in English that was set in the period of the two most recent Chechen wars.

Anthony Marra

#47. Most English writers are not interested in change but in the social novel. That demands a static backdrop. I'm intensely interested in change - probably as a matter of self-preservation. What the hell is going to happen next?

J.G. Ballard

#48. Of course we all know that's not how life works. The novel that is our life can end at any time. Sometimes even on page one.

Junot Diaz

#49. I started on the original comics from Stan Lee and all the artists and storytellers did from there, and I got to the graphic novel that Chris Clairmont did, which is the one Stryker comes from - 'God Loves, Man Kills', which is a brilliant story.

Josh Helman

#50. My son, Wolf, was born when I was past 40 and the author of a best-selling novel. That means he has grown up a middle-class child - one who sometimes asks me for stories of my childhood but knows nothing of what it means to grow up poor and afraid. I have worked to make sure of that.

Dorothy Allison

#51. Being a novelist and being a mother have exactly coincided in my life: the call from my agent saying that I had a contract for my first novel - that was on my answering phone message when I got back from the hospital with my first child.

Barbara Kingsolver

#52. The experience of writing 'The Kite Runner' is one I will always think back on with fondness. There is an energy, a romance in writing the first novel that can never be duplicated again.

Khaled Hosseini

#53. If you don't like my book, write your own. If you don't think you can write a novel, that ought to tell you something. If you think you can, do. No excuses. If you still don't like my novels, find a book you do like.

Rita Mae Brown

#54. By far the most usual way of handling phenomena so novel that they would make for a serious rearrangement of our preconceptions is to ignore them altogether, or to abuse those who bear witness for them.

William James

#55. 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

#56. Often touching ... Monumental Propaganda is a novel that slashes and rips ... In his translation, Andrew Bromfield deftly shifts his tone and tools as required, remaining true to Voinovich's Vonnegut-like playfulness and appreciation of the absurb.

Ken Kalfus

#57. She was like a heroine in a novel that she herself was writing the character kept protesting that she was too strong for love and yet the narrator went on describing her desire.

Anna Godbersen

#58. I don't say anything and he casually leans against my desk, picking up the novel that's sitting there.
"It's bullshit," he tells me, flicking through it. "There's no such thing as Atticus Finch."
I shrug. "It'd be nice if there was, though.

Melina Marchetta

#59. 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

#60. As far as I can tell, a young adult novel is a regular novel that people actually read.

Stephen Colbert

#61. I work continuously within the shadow of failure. For every novel that makes it to my publisher's desk, there are at least five or six that died on the way. And even with the ones I do finish, I think of all the ways they might have been better.

Gail Godwin

#62. I have never known a novel that was good enough to be good in spite of its being adapted to the author's political views.

Edith Wharton

#63. 'Dexter,' while the pilot shares moments with the novel that created the character of Dexter, they completely abandoned the book from that moment on.

Jim Rash

#64. I started out hoping to remind people at some point in the novel that we should be loving and kind. But then the theme usurped my life, spilling over into my novels until love was no longer a small voice, but now my purpose as a writer.

Patricia Hickman

#65. I had just begun an M.A. in Creative Writing, and I had to write a novel, so I began writing a novel that later became 'A Life Apart.'

Neel Mukherjee

#66. She was sleeping on the bed like a novel that is yet to be read and he sat on the floor, reading her, moving his fingers through her hair and staring at her face like she was magic that none ever understood.

Akshay Vasu

#67. Waiting for the Electricity is a wildly original and ambitious debut, a novel that tackles cultural clashes with satirical hilarity. I haven't read a first novel this promising since The Confederacy of Dunces.

Jill Ciment

#68. After college, I was living in New York and wrote furiously, a huge novel that I knew was a failure. I hoped that the book would work, but to be honest, I think I knew it would never work, even as I was finishing it.

Chang-rae Lee

#69. I think my writing process changes as I gain more life experience ... It has taken me many years to be able to write a novel that shows the points of view of people of different ages and personalities.

Kathleen Winter

#70. I can't envision an honest war novel that left war in a positive light.

Kevin Powers

#71. Not every novel that wants to be a tragedy gets to be one.

Jane Smiley

#72. Beware: I'm unafraid to host a big spoiler party--a novel that can be truly "spoiled" by the summary of its plot is a novel that was already spoiled by that plot.

James Wood

#73. I'm not a twentieth-century novelist, I'm not modern, and certainly not postmodern. I follow the form of the nineteenth-century novel; that was the century that produced the models of the form. I'm old-fashioned, a storyteller. I'm not an analyst, and I'm not an intellectual.

John Irving

#74. 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

#75. 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

#76. 'Bag of Bones' was a big, distorted yet wonderfully entertaining novel that rode high on the bestseller lists in 1998.

Jay Parini

#77. You never learn how to write a novel. You just learn how to write the novel that you're writing.

Gene Wolfe

#78. With any novel that you begin, you can't foresee how difficult or easy it's going to be, and you can't really prepare yourself. You just have a take it one step at a time and know that it's all right to keep going - you can always fix it.

Jane Smiley

#79. It's true that immigrant novels have to do with people going from one country to another, but there isn't a single novel that doesn't travel from one place to another, emotionally or locally.

Oscar Hijuelos

#80. You want the secret off my succes; my recipe? I have always brought the same care to making an adventure novel, a serialized novel, that others would bring to the making of a poem. My ambition was to raise the level of this much maligned genre.

Gaston Leroux

#81. I am not only the person who wrote and sold a novel while raising a houseful of biological and foster children; I am also the person who wrote a horrific young adult novel that never sold and gave up on a foster child I couldn't handle - an experience that still haunts me.

Vanessa Diffenbaugh

#82. Just about everybody has written a first novel that they throw away before writing their actual first novel.

Daniel Handler

#83. I write short stories when a little idea occurs to me, that I know isn't a part of a novel that will stand by itself and should be concentrated.

Roddy Doyle

#84. The first novel that I wrote was because I was having very interesting sorts of experiences, for Indians of my generation.

Karan Bajaj

#85. I much prefer a plotted novel to a novel that is really conceptual.

Eleanor Catton

#86. The Bible is a novel that's crazy ... it has murder, it has victory it has mayhem, it has disaster, it has war, sanctification.

Fred Hammond

#87. In the crime fiction section, you may just find a novel that talks about the place where you're from and speaks to you about your life - or the life yours could have become if a little misfortune had come your way.

Adrian McKinty

#88. Writing a novel that works is an extremely difficult thing to do. It requires a level of skill and dedication that always surprises me.

Bret Easton Ellis

#89. I'm good with a grill. I like to make cheeseburgers - I once read in a David Goodis crime novel that you're only supposed to flip a burger once.

Noah Baumbach

#90. For me, it would be pointless to write a novel that I knew I could complete within a specific length of time. I could do that only by repeating something I had done before, and I've never wanted to do that.

Charles Palliser

#91. Currently she was midway through a bittersweet David Nicholls novel that any other time might well have made her self-indulgently reflective.

Freya North

#92. I had written a novel that was more of a classic linear novel, and I worked on it and worked on it for years, and it always seemed like it wouldn't catch fire. At a certain point I just scrapped it all, and I kept maybe 15 percent of it, and I wrote those parts out on note cards.

Jenny Offill

#93. Mankind is focused on earth; he is mostly interested in stupid things like wars or ideological absurdities. What he has to do is to concentrate on the universe, because the universe is a cosmic novel that he must read fully, that he must understand fully and that in the end he must rewrite it!

Mehmet Murat Ildan

#94. Romantic fiction, in the broader sense, can be any novel that has a love story somewhere in it. It can be a mystery or a historical novel, as long as it has this very strong romantic thread running through it.

Susanna Kearsley

#95. should like to write a novel certainly, a novel that would be as lovely as a Persian carpet and as unreal. But

Oscar Wilde

#96. A lyrical, brave and complex novel that takes enormous risks and pulls them all off.

Peter Straub

#97. You talk books away," he said; "why don't you write one?" "I am too fond of reading books to care to write them, Mr. Erskine. I should like to write a novel certainly, a novel that would be as lovely as a Persian carpet and as unreal.

Oscar Wilde

#98. A novel that does not uncover a hitherto unknown segment of existence is immoral. Knowledge is the novel's only morality.

Milan Kundera

#99. 'Blood Meridian' was without question the novel that made me want to become a writer.

Rachel Kushner

#100. I wanted to write a novel that would make others feel the history: the pain and fear that black people have had to live through in order to endure.

Octavia E. Butler