Novels The Quotes

#1. In pre-movie days, the business of peddling lies about life was spotty and unorganized. It was carried on by the cheaper magazines, dime novels, the hinterland preachers and whooping politicians.

Ben Hecht

#2. But then in novels the most indifferent hero comes out right at last. Some god comes out of a theatrical cloud and leaves the poor devil ten thousand-a-year and a title.

Anthony Trollope

#3. My mom wasn't, like, she was reading all these historical romance novels the majority of the time. She read a feminist book and then my dad would sit down and explain it to her like she was an idiot.

Kathleen Hanna

#4. From the beginnings of literature, poets and writers have based their narratives on crossing borders, on wandering, on exile, on encounters beyond the familiar. The stranger is an archetype in epic poetry, in novels. The tension between alienation and assimilation has always been a basic theme.

Jhumpa Lahiri

#5. I am reminded of one of my father's novels, The Era of Hopeful Monsters. It was about a planet where the humanoids ignored their most serious survival problems until the last possible moment.

Kurt Vonnegut

#6. The rustic, the reader of novels, the pure ascetic: these three are truly happy men

Fernando Pessoa

#7. I've always had a compassion for characters in novels - the sense that they are, whatever they might think, living in a world that has a shape they don't know and can't finally alter.

John Crowley

#8. All my life I have been acutely aware of a contradiction in the very nature of my existence. For forty-five years I struggled to resolve this dilemma by writing plays and novels. The more I wrote, the more I realized mere words were not enough. So I found another form of expression.

Yukio Mishima

#9. The best novels, the writer's imagination becomes the reader's reality.

William Golding

#10. Here's the thing about romance novels: The moment when the hero and heroine discover that they're perfect for each other is often the moment when it's them against the world.

Sarah MacLean

#11. I chose a time in the century which had the greatest moments for novels - the late '30s and World War II.

Alan Furst

#12. In most novels, the landscape, or the place, in which the story takes part is simply a backdrop to the human action.

Paul Kingsnorth

#13. We used to spend hours talking. We never got tired of talking, never raun out of topics - novels, the world, scenery, language. Our conversations were more open and intimate than ane lovers'.

Haruki Murakami

#14. According to Lacey's romance novels, the fittest ghosts are good, apart from them breaking your heart with their soul-crushing dashingness - Lacey's words.

Sarah Dalton

#15. Dune Messiah is the most misunderstood of Frank Herbert's novels. The reasons for this are as fascinating and complex as the renowned author himself.

Brian Herbert

#16. Romantic novels, the kissing scenes, the ditching scenes have taught the youth of India more English than all the English classes in school combined.

Sneha Mehta

#17. Artists hide their identities in the brushstrokes of their paintings, the verses in their cantos, and the sentences in their novels. The true face of an artist is never on his face and this is what he prefers. Others misunderstand this displaced melancholy with an absence of melancholy.

Bruce Crown

#18. Movies are not novels, and that's why, when filmmakers try to adapt novels, particularly long or complex novels, the result is almost always failure. It can't be done.

Paul Auster

#19. About the Author Donna Tartt was born in Greenwood, Mississippi, and is a graduate of Bennington College. She is the author of the novels The Secret History and The Little Friend, which have been translated into thirty languages.

Anonymous

#20. I'm just trying to tell a good story and make thought-provoking, entertaining films. I just try and draw upon the great culture we have as a people, from music, novels, the streets.

Spike Lee

#21. There were a lot of adventure books for boys, historical novels by Kenneth Roberts, and whatever mystery novels the alarmed librarian imagined might not corrupt an eager but innocent youth.

Peter Straub

#22. what I call the "first love syndrome," found not only in what we most like in online systems but in movies, television shows, and novels.The principle is that we most love what we first experience

Paul Levinson

#23. Whether you look at Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, or Buddhism, wherever a distinction of sex is made, it is to the advantage of men. If you think of religions as if they were novels, the authors are men, and so are the major characters ...

Katha Pollitt

#24. In the world of crime novels, the annual Audible Sounds of Crime awards are a pretty big deal, and I was thrilled to be shortlisted for my fifth novel in my bestselling Nic Costa series.

David Hewson

#25. One thinks of the failure of representation since 9/11, the proliferation of novels, the media glut, the surfeit of images that somehow slide too easily into a banal repertoire, commodified shock.

Maureen N. McLane

#26. This is one of his most human and most amusing and witty novels. The characters are very Indian. I decided that I wanted to do a comedy, so this was just the right one.

Ismail Merchant

#27. I'm not writing novels, the screenplays are my novels, so I'm gonna write it the best that I can. If the movie never gets made, it'd almost be okay because I did it. It's there on the page.

Quentin Tarantino

#28. She was the amoureuse of all the novels, the heroine of all the plays, the vague "she" of all the poetry books.

Gustave Flaubert

#29. I've consciously tried not to romanticize anything, especially not intelligence work. I've always said that I've been writing a series of episodic, naturalistic novels. The people just happen to be spies, politicians, civil servants.

Charles McCarry

#30. A ruling passion gives to a shelf of novels the unity of a system.

Graham Greene

#31. For research, I like to go to the location of the places in the novels. The first thing that I do is involve my senses: I notice the smells; I open the trash cans and look at what people have thrown away.

Natsuo Kirino

#32. I loved him, but love isn't enough. All the fairy tales, the romance novels, the soap operas; they're all lies. Love does not conquer all.

Laurell K. Hamilton

#33. Ideas take root at the oddest moments. Some grow into novels, the weaker ones wither and die.

Pippa DaCosta

#34. My literature is much more the result of a paradox than that of an implacable logic, typical of police novels. The paradox is the tension that exists in my soul.

Paulo Coelho

#35. There is only one expert who is qualified to examine the souls and the life of a people and make a valuable report - the native novelist ... And when a thousand able novels have been written, there you have the soul of the people; and not anywhere else can these be had.

Mark Twain

#36. Our lover is the sun, and we the stars forever floating in their glow. We push and push, yearning for our sun's rays to reach out and touch us for just a moment in time ... one second-glance to warm our spirits and soothe our aching hearts.

Katlyn Charlesworth

#37. Angel blinked hard and bit her lip, trying to stop the quivering of her chin. "I feel like I've waited my whole life for him, waited to get to this point where I could appreciate and value him most.

Linda Winfree

#38. For me, movies and television are interesting because they are the dominant storytelling form of our time. My first love will always be fiction, and especially novels, but I'm a writer ... I write poetry and essays and criticism and I'd love to write a whole play, and sometimes I even write scripts.

Jess Walter

#39. And then the critics, going back to the novels of his maturity, found that their English had a nervous, racy vigour that eminently suited the matter.

W. Somerset Maugham

#40. I've learned to accept the fact that my students are far too busy preparing for their own legal careers to care one bit about the off-campus antics of Professor Burke. I get the impression that my students are vaguely aware of my novels, but are at best mildly curious.

Alafair Burke

#41. My wife is the most savage critic. She doesn't feel intimidated by my reputation. As far as she's concerned, she's just criticising a boyfriend who'd recently had a go at fiction. She can tell me to abandon whole novels.

Kazuo Ishiguro

#42. Wouldn't you like to believe you're the center of someone's universe? To feel so special that the rest of the world didn't matter and it could all wait? What would you be willing to pay for that - any time you needed to feel that way?

D.A. Rhine

#43. ..love is as complex an emotion as exists. There are many reasons why love does not prosper.
.. the waters are perilous, and you would do well to know that, because unlike your novels, not every story has a happy ending.

Mary Lydon Simonsen

#44. Having read several prize-winning novels, Fancy was confident that she now knew the recipe:
1. Write a simple narrative.
2. Make a long list.
3. Scatter the contents of your list throughout your narrative.

Jaclyn Moriarty

#45. When I write a novel, I want it to be completely different from a screenplay. I'm very conscious of the difference, and I want novels to work purely as novels. Otherwise I don't see how they'll survive - why don't we just all go to the movies or watch television.

Kazuo Ishiguro

#46. I had wanted to write English crime novels based on the American hard-boiled style, and for the first two novels about Brixton, the critics didn't actually know I was Irish.

Ken Bruen

#47. The great novels have marched with the years. They are the contemporaries of time.

Ellen Glasgow

#48. I'm back, boys and girls! back from the pink padded couch palace!

Scott McCloud

#49. You won't always have the luxury of a second chance. So be careful with your first one.

Donna Kauffman

#50. Intricately plotted, beautifully paced, The Music of the Spheres is an elegant historical novel rich in detail, at times Dickensian in its description of London. Elizabeth Redfern has made an exciting debut.

Martha Grimes

#51. The man she wanted existed only in the romantic novels she was reading. She had met him. But he would never meet her.

Mary Papas

#52. It's not the having of the gift that makes the difference in life here or in another place. It's how we use that gift that shows the true heart. ~ Acronis

Madison Thorne Grey

#53. Many of my works fall into the category of 'Zeitgeist novels'. Yet I hope that they aren't only reportage, but also attempts to convey the sense of the present to the future.

Will Self

#54. Novels arise out of the shortcoings of history.

Novalis

#55. I'm an avid reader. Novels, non-fiction, comics, it doesn't matter. Best way in the world to feed your head.

Reid Scott

#56. Every one of my novels could be entitled The Unbearable Lightness of Being or The Joke or Laughable Loves; the titles are interchangeable, they reflect the small number of themes that obsess me, define me, and unfortunately, restrict me. Beyond these themes, I have nothing else to say or write.

Milan Kundera

#57. Some Prologue really makes you speechless and you started imagining the whole story and want to read it as soon as possible. One such prologue, which I read today was from "Me "N" Her.. A strange feeling by Rikky Bhartia ... "
By Himani Gupta

Rikky Bhartia

#58. When novels deal in abstractions, they generally go off the rails.

Philipp Meyer

#59. During the day she would read science fiction novels. In the evenings she watched television. And she ate, and ate, and drank, and ate.

Fay Weldon

#60. If we think of the novel and the epic ... The difference lies in the fact that the important thing about the epic is a hero
a man who is a pattern for all men. While, as Mencken pointed out, the essence of most novels lies in the breaking down of a man, in the degeneration of character.

Jorge Luis Borges

#61. Absolutely breathtaking, nail-biting, and edge-of-your-seat. Michael Koryta is a master at maintaining suspense and a hell of a good writer. THOSE WHO WISH ME DEAD is one of the best chase-and-escape novels you'll read this year-or any other year. The pace never lets up.

Nelson DeMille

#62. You are the last thought in my mind before I drift off to sleep and the first thought when I wake up each morning.

Richard Kronick

#63. Historians turning their hands to fiction are all the rage. Since Alison Weir led the way in 2006, an ever-growing number of established non-fiction writers - Giles Milton, Simon Sebag Montefiore, Harry Sidebottom, Patrick Bishop, Ian Mortimer and myself included - have written historical novels.

Saul David

#64. It takes a truly great man to see that he's been wrong and to apologize for it, even in the face of the obvious.

Amy Lane

#65. Oh! No, I only mean what I have read about. It always puts me in mind of the country that Emily and her father travelled through, in The Mysteries of Udolpho. But you never read novels, I dare say?" "Why not?" "Because they are not clever enough for you - gentlemen read better books.

Jane Austen

#66. On the contrary, I think making you happy should be taken very seriously.

Drea Damara

#67. The best of fiction, as we know, of course, doesn't tell the truth; it tales the truth.

Criss Jami

#68. Contemporary novels can have a fleeting existence within the current multiplication of medias and the technological rapidity with which art is delivered and consumed. A cultural lacuna has opened, one that needs arresting.

Tom Cardamone

#69. Writing novels is the most exciting.

Sidney Sheldon

#70. I've always had the wish, the nostalgia to be able to write detective novels. At heart, the principal themes of detective novels are close to the things that obsess me: disappearance, the problems of identity, amnesia, the return to an enigmatic past.

Patrick Modiano

#71. My favorite novels allow me to imagine the characters afterward and what happened, and that I've witnessed a really great story, where the world goes on.

J.H. Wyman

#72. I could go off into the wilderness and write fantasy novels for the rest of my life and probably be happy; but I always want to challenge myself.

Felicia Day

#73. Life is like a friendship, eventually it will end, by conflict or God's hand"
-Sons In The Clouds

Randy Mitchell

#74. Helena had been standing by her window looking out to sea, breathing in the fresh air and admiring the picturesque scene of a small ship sailing into the harbor.
She had not been able to think of anything other than Mikolas for days.
From LONGING the 3rd chapter of TRUE LOVE

Destin Bays

#75. Part of the desire to see each other succeed is to stop putting a price on success.

Crystal Evans

#76. Me, sweep him off his feet? I know. The laws of the jungle and romance novels would have it the other way around, but I'm not going to wait one more second for that.

Laini Taylor

#77. Oh, now look what you've done. You've gone and pissed him off, Breccan said as he stood behind two of the gypsies, one of his large hands clamped down on each of their shoulders.

Madison Thorne Grey

#78. The best novels capture the times in which the writer lives, which accounts for the current, if contrasting taste for lost utopias and dystopian nightmares peopled by vampires and wolves.

Chloe Thurlow

#79. Any attempt to list the ten best science fiction novels is doomed to failure.

Ann Leckie

#80. The romance genre is the only genre where readers are guaranteed novels that place the heroine at the heart of the story. These are books that celebrate women's heroic virtues and values: courage, honor, determination and a belief in the healing power of love.

Jayne Ann Krentz

#81. When I look at life I try to be as agnostic and unmetaphysical as possible. So I have to admit that, most probably, we do not have a fate. But I think that's something that draws us to novels - that the characters always have a fate. Even if it's a terrible fate, at least they have one.

Daniel Kehlmann

#82. Katie leaned forward conspiratorially. Oh, sweetie, I just said that because Alice is an old bag. You go after Devon. The man is fine. I don't blame you for changing your look for a shot at that. When the pool about you two gets going at Petie's Pub, I'm putting my money on you.

Susan Meier

#83. In my view, the plangent artificiality of a lot of creative work results from the fact that the people who write novels, direct films and put on plays tend to read too many novels, watch too many films and go to too many plays.

Will Self

#84. My second book, Follow Me Down had some success, got good critical notices, went into a second printing and things like that, but Shiloh was by far the most successful of those first five novels.

Shelby Foote

#85. I've written a lot of novels for teens and tweens ... but I'd never really tackled the North Carolina side of me. And it's so strong and so important, and yet I hadn't acknowledged it. And so one of the things I wanted to do in "Shine" is take that on.

Lauren Myracle

#86. I was where my heart held out hope that someday I would be again. It was the reason I never forgot him. My heart had held onto him. And as he clung to me, as he soothed me, held me, I felt everything begin to relax.

Rebecca Ethington

#87. If the shining sun blinds the eye,it makes sense. But to be blinded by gold and silver!

I.R. Shankar

#88. Really good 'hard' novels - say, Wolf Hall - yield, if you read them carefully, the information you need when you need it, in order to follow their paths. But there is a point at which subtle storytelling maneuvers outmaneuver their own intelligibility.

Daniel Menaker

#89. After closely examining my conscience, I venture to state that in my historical novels I intended the content to be just as modern and up-to-date as in the contemporary ones.

Lion Feuchtwanger

#90. Philosophers have argued without a trend toward order; time would lack meaning. The future would be indistinguishable from the past. Sequences of events would be just so many random scenes from a thousand novels. History would be indistinct, like the mist slowly gathered by treetops in evening.

Alan Lightman

#91. When I was in my early 20s, my dream was to write mystery novels. I wanted to do what my favourite crime writer, Ross Macdonald, did - crank out a book a year. The only problem - and it was a considerable one - was that I stank.

Linwood Barclay

#92. (Paris, keeper of Promiscuity, enjoyed romance novels), and weird silver lamps that twisted and curved over the chairs; he had no idea who those were for. Fresh flowers bloomed from vases, sweetly scenting the air. Again, he had no idea. Fine. He'd requested those. That shit smelled good. Gideon

Gena Showalter

#93. When I write a book I'm always questioning the project as a whole. I always feel I might have to just throw it away and forget about it, and I've done that with novels I've started and worked on for a long time. It's an option I need in order to write freely.

Daniel Kehlmann

#94. I am Superwoman. I am the author of 15 novels, including one about cancer. I am not, however, someone who 'gets' cancer. I am a sun worshipper who never thought it could happen to me.

Jane Green

#95. He said he wants variety. The irony is that I wanted variety too. But I wanted variety in a solid, stable committed relationship where I would wake up each morning asking "What are we going to do today?" not asking "Who are you going to do today?

Aimee Lane

#96. For me, writing post-apocalyptic novels isn't so much about exploding helicopters and fifty-megaton doomsday bombs as it is about the pleasure of dealing with the best of everything that makes us human: cleverness, grit, loyalty, and self-sacrifice.

Jeff Carlson

#97. 10% of authors earn 75% of the royalties. If you're writing a Romance novel, your odds will be slightly higher at making back your investment. Throw in a few vampires, even better.

J.R. Young

#98. One did not drink sherry before the evening, just as one did not read a novel in the morning.

Barbara Pym

#99. I have always loved to read, and now that I have penned 10 novels and a few magazine articles, I have fallen seriously in love with writing stories and seeing them go out into the world. It's magical, you know?

Dorothea Benton Frank

#100. The rule for finding plots for character-centered novels, which is to ask: 'So what's the worst possible thing I can do to *this* guy?' And then do it.

Lois McMaster Bujold