Novels The Quotes

#1. 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

#2. 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

#3. 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

#4. 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

#5. 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

#6. 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

#7. 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

#8. 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

#9. ..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

#10. 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

#11. 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

#12. 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

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

Ellen Glasgow

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

Scott McCloud

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

Donna Kauffman

#16. 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

#17. 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

#18. 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

#19. 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

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

Novalis

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

Reid Scott

#22. 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

#23. 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

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

Philipp Meyer

#25. 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

#26. 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

#27. 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

#28. 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

#29. 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

#30. 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

#31. 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

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

Drea Damara

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

Criss Jami

#34. 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

#35. Writing novels is the most exciting.

Sidney Sheldon

#36. 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

#37. 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

#38. 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

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

Randy Mitchell

#40. 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

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

Crystal Evans

#42. 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

#43. 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

#44. 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

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

Ann Leckie

#46. 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

#47. 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

#48. 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

#49. 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

#50. 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

#51. 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

#52. 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

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

I.R. Shankar

#54. 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

#55. 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

#56. 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

#57. 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

#58. (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

#59. 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

#60. 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

#61. 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

#62. 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

#63. 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

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

Barbara Pym

#65. 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

#66. 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

#67. I feel like it's hard to get into historical novels where you know what the story is far too well.

Matthew Tobin Anderson

#68. There are just two things you need to fix here: the interior and the exterior.

David Mazzucchelli

#69. I love how easy it is to run my business, Writing Workshops Los Angeles, with the help of email and my website. I love that I don't have to use cuneiform, a quill, or a typewriter to write my novels - I love to write on my laptop!

Edan Lepucki

#70. Walter Scott has no business to write novels, especially good ones. - It is not fair. - He has fame and profit enough as a poet, and should not be taking the bread out of other people's mouths. - I do not like him, and do not mean to like Waverley if I can help it - but fear I must.

Jane Austen

#71. I've never felt as happy as I've been for the past month. And I've never loved anyone like I love you right now.

Natalie Ansard

#72. I wrote three novels in six months, with a clarity of focus and attention to detail that I had never before experienced. This type of sublime creative energy is characteristic of the elevated and productive mood state known as hypomania.

Ayelet Waldman

#73. I entered a poem in a poetry contest around 1987, and the poem won and I received $1,000 for it. That made me realize that maybe what I was writing was worth reading to people. After that, for some reason, I turned to novels and I've written mainly novels ever since.

Sharon Creech

#74. With almost every book I've written, my secret target audience is the young therapist. In this way, I am staying in my professorial role; I'm writing teaching stories and teaching novels.

Irvin D. Yalom

#75. People are so used to reading novels now, they just read a poem straight through to get the meaning. And that's something totally different from the slow way you read something if it's a tune; which to me a poem has to be.

Alice Oswald

#76. I knew that by this time tomorrow, I was going to be eternally grateful for falling down the stairs and knocking myself unconscious. Smartest dumbest thing I'd ever done.

Erin McCarthy

#77. I like Jo Nesbo and Hakan Nesser. There are so many good books in the world. I don't want to spend time reading bad crime novels.

Maj Sjowall

#78. Writers are a savage breed, Mr. Strike. If you want life-long friendship and selfless camaraderie, join the army and learn to kill. If you want a lifetime of temporary alliances with peers who will glory in your every failure, write novels.

Robert Galbraith

#79. Novels attempt to render human experience; that's really all they are. They are meant to convey empathy for the character.

Sue Monk Kidd

#80. My first two novels were set in the past, and that freed me up in a lot of ways; it allowed me to find my way into my story and my characters through research.

Jennifer Gilmore

#81. The destruction of something beautiful can appear so entertaining.

Thomas Sweeney

#82. Not many people were speaking truth to power in the '80s. I had a really good time doing it - I found it gratifying. It was a joy to have an opportunity to say what you believed. It's challenging to do it in fiction, but I liked writing the novels. I liked writing 'Democracy' particularly.

Joan Didion

#83. I feel that I am a scholar who only with the left hand writes novels.

Umberto Eco

#84. I make a rod for my own back because people see my novels as quasi documentaries. But it is never history that's the main event of my books. It's my characters.

Christopher Koch

#85. You know, in the old days, you might be able to slowly sort of build an audience for your work by publishing two, three novels before you hit it big. You know, now, there's much more of an emphasis in the publishing houses on making sure that every book makes money.

Chad Harbach

#86. People used to expect literary novels to deepen the experience of living; now they are happy with any sustained display of writerly cleverness.

Brian Reynolds Myers

#87. The real question is: How do you react? What do you do next? Evade responsibilities? Bury yourself in work? What do you do? All three of my novels take up that question, although none gives an answer.

David Guterson

#88. Stories and novels consist of three parts: narration, which moves the story from point A to point B and finally to point Z; description, which creates a sensory reality for the reader; and dialogue, which brings characters to life through their speech.

Stephen King

#89. According to a high percentage of novels I've read, it appears that falling in love at the beach is both easier and more satisfying than falling in love in a grocery store or mall.

Erin McCahan

#90. Have you never been so heartbreakingly lonely that you felt as though you would go mad?
- Darcia Moon, Gravitation, Book One: Beyond the Pale

N.L. Armitage

#91. A woman in Charlotte approached me and said that she's tired of the dysfunction in my novels. I told her I was sorry, but that is how the world has presented itself to me throughout my life.

Pat Conroy

#92. I could hardly wait for following chapters, which arrived in dribs and drabs, and I began to feel for all the world like the young T.B. Macaulay walking from London to meet the Cambridge coach bearing the next installment of Waverley novels.

Vernon Sproxton

#93. Afterward, Sara didn't really remember falling asleep, still wearing her robe although she meant to get dressed and had had Serafina lay out a pair of jeans and a blouse for her. In any case, she had slept. And there had been dreams
of the unsettling kind she didn't want to recall.

Rosemary Rogers

#94. Society is the stage on which manners are shown; novels are the literature. Novels are the journal or record of manners; and the new importance of these books derives from the fact, that the novelist begins to penetrate the surface, and treat this part of life more worthily.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

#95. When I started out in the eighties, the idea of creating serious comics for adults was pretty laughable to most folks, and for the longest time it was hard to even explain what alternative comics or graphic novels were. Nobody seemed to understand or care. Not so, any longer.

Seth

#96. Vonnegut's earliest novels hint strongly at his familiarity with Wiener's work, The Human Use of Human Beings, especially his first novel, Player Piano (1952), which shows his concern for the social implications of automation, the replacement of human beings with machines.

David Porush

#97. I believe that the short story is as different a form from the novel as poetry is, and the best stories seem to me to be perhaps closer in spirit to poetry than to novels.

Tobias Wolff

#98. So many Indian novels, quite unfairly, do not get the prominence they should because they have been written in a language other than English.

Vikram Seth

#99. Sometimes I wonder if novel writers aren't completely f**ked in the head. ~ Drew Stirling

Jayden Hunter

#100. Affection is when we can't find any flaws in the other. Maybe I could if I really wanted to, but I don't want to, I accept you as you are.

Erika M. Szabo