Top 100 Quotes About A Good Novel
#1. I have always argued, in a good novel, interesting things happen to interesting people.
Guy Gavriel Kay
#2. When I give myself over to a good novel, I surrender to the truths fashioned from one writer's heart, mind and soul. I do not waste a nanosecond wondering whether what I'm reading 'really happened.'
Julia Glass
#3. A guava tree in bloom, for instance, lost in the pages of a good novel, can bring delight with its fictional perfume to any number of real rooms.
Jose Eduardo Agualusa
#4. There are plenty of bad editors who try to impose their own vision on a book. ( ... )
A good novel editor is invisible.
Terri Windling
#5. As the sweaty, alcohol fuming bodies press in on me from all directions I decide that my ideal of a good time is reading a good novel, alone
Rita Stradling
#6. The person, be it gentleman or lady, who has not pleasure in a good novel, must be intolerably stupid.
Jane Austen
#7. I think a good novel can be a doorstop to despair. I also think the real bravery comes with those who prepared to go through that door and look at the world in all its grime and torment, and still find something of value, no matter how small.
Colum McCann
#8. You can't write ... on the strength of influence. You can only write a good story or a good novel by yourself.
Richard Ford
#9. There are many things behind a good novel, but in particular there is a lot of work - a lot of patience, a lot of stubbornness, and a critical spirit.
Mario Vargas-Llosa
#10. I don't like jokes in speeches. I do like wit and humor. A joke is to humor what pornography is to erotic language in a good novel.
James C. Humes
#11. I am obsessed with story. I had a late awakening in life. In college was the first time that I understood what you could do with a story and what a good novel is - literary value and subtext and irony and everything.
Shane Carruth
#13. 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
#14. I stopped buying Sunday papers about 15 years ago, because you'd buy handfuls of them, and what you got, because the hard news comes from so many other channels, was opinion pieces. You're better off spending the money on a good novel.
Gerry Adams
#15. 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
#16. Many critics, when trying to praise a short-story collection, will say that it has the heft and scope of a good novel. But for me, one of the highest compliments you can pay a novel is to say that it has the rich texture and eloquent detail of a good story collection.
Gary Krist
#17. A good novel is worth more then the best scientific study.
Saul Bellow
#18. A good novel tells us the truth about its hero; but a bad novel tells us the truth about its author.
G.K. Chesterton
#19. I didn't have a list of things I should do this year, next year, find a good novel, sign two stars and make a deal - because I think cinema should come from cinema. I never adapted anything. Beautiful books are beautiful books, that's it. I don't know why we should transform them.
Agnes Varda
#20. When we're done with it, we may find - if it's a good novel - that we're a bit different from what we were before we read it, that we have been changed a little, as if by having meet a new face, crossed a street we've never crossed before.
Ursula K. Le Guin
#21. A good novel cannot be too long nor a bad novel too short.
Ellen Glasgow
#22. 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
#24. Great fiction shows us not how to conduct our behavior but how to feel. Eventually, it may show us how to face our feelings and face our actions and to have new inklings about what they mean. A good novel of any year can initiate us into our own new experience.
Eudora Welty
#25. A good novel, one which entices the author as much as it beckons the reader.
W.J. Raymond
#26. 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
#27. The ingredients that make a good poem often differ from those that make a good essay and from those that make a good novel.
Kathleen Rooney
#28. I don't think the 'what' distinguishes a good novel from a bad one but rather the 'how.'
Joseph Heller
#29. A good novel should be deeply unsettling - its satisfactions should come from its authenticity and its formal coherence. We must feel something crucial is at stake.
Dana Spiotta
#30. When I tell people there are three stories in 'Thunderstruck' that were from the same wrecked novel, they want to guess what they are. Nobody has. There are no characters or timelines in common. They're structured very differently. A good novel wouldn't have pulled apart so easily.
Elizabeth McCracken
#31. I hate the concept of likeability - it gave us two terms of George Bush, whom a plurality of voters wanted to have a beer with, and Facebook. You'd unfriend a lot of people if you knew them as intimately and unsparingly as a good novel would. But not the ones you actually love.
Jonathan Franzen
#32. I can't think of any film that improved on a good novel, but I can think of many good films that came from very bad novels.
Gabriel Garcia Marquez
#33. There is not a lost piece of yourself that can't be found in a good novel.
Kimberly Jo Smith
#34. JACK KIRBY is also the central personage of this novel because this is not a good novel. This is a seriously mixed-up book with a central personage who never appears. The plot, like life, resolves into nothing and features emotional suffering without meaning.
Jarett Kobek
#35. A good novel begins with a small question and ends with a bigger one.
Paula Fox
#36. My test of a good novel is dreading to begin the last chapter.
Tom Helm
#37. Time, effort & persistence make for the writing of a good novel. There's no such thing as "writer's block." Just reluctance to make the slog
Mark Rubinstein
#38. Judgments and secrets are what make a good novel.
Tobias Hill
#39. A good novel is a conjunction of many factors, the main of which is without a doubt, hard work.
Mario Vargas-Llosa
#40. Life has its pains and evils-its bitter disappointments; but like a good novel and in healthful length of days, there is infinite joy in seeing the World, the most interesting of continued stories, unfold ...
W.E.B. Du Bois
#41. A good novel doesn't just transcend the boundaries of its target market - it knows nothing about target markets.
Julianna Baggott
#43. I've sold too many books to get good reviews anymore. There's a lot of jealousy, because [reviewers] think they can write a good novel or a best-seller and get frustrated when they can't. I've learned to despise them.
John Grisham
#44. A good novel can be a doorstop to despair.
Colum McCann
#45. 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
#46. A good novel is an out-of-self experience. It lifts you off the ground so that you have the sensation of flying. It says, 'Look at the world around you; learn from the people in these pages, neither quite me nor quite you, how life is lived in so many different ways.'
Julia Glass
#47. A good novel is the biography of an imaginary person--and when the biography is completed, the person is no longer imaginary; he is as real as his creator
William Edmund Barrett
#48. unbelievable fairy tale ever. And now, people read those BDSM books like they're going out of style because it makes them wet. That sure as fuck doesn't make it a good novel. A porno movie will make them wet too, but it sure doesn't mean it's a good movie. I fucking swear," he said.
Scott Hildreth
#49. I am a novelist. I traffic in subtleties, and my goal in writing a novel is to leave the reader not knowing what to think. A good novel shouldn't have a point.
Teju Cole
#50. I don't think it's possible to write a good novel around a negative personality.
Alberto Moravia
#51. A good novel is a good novel, pointe finale. And I think what I'm writing is exactly that.
Louise Penny
#52. 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
#53. She could not see what good it would do anyone to read a novel of this kind. Yet she was writing it.
Doris Lessing
#54. Good fiction creates empathy. A novel takes you somewhere and asks you to look through the eyes of another person, to live another life.
Barbara Kingsolver
#55. I have a really good idea for a novel and would like to just kind of try my hand at fiction. I'm starting to kind of get a really good body of work going from a literary standpoint. As long as the audience is there, man, I'll keep cranking them out.
Corey Taylor
#56. I wasn't the demonstrative type. I didn't say I love you all the time, and I wasn't girlish or giggly. I hated shopping in pairs and preferred staying home with a good romance novel than a girls' night out. But I figured sometimes you have to meet someone halfway.
C.D. Reiss
#57. Deciding to write a novel about something - as opposed to finding you are writing a novel around something - sounds to me like a good evocation of writer's block.
Martin Amis
#58. I think that if the novel's task is to describe where we find ourselves and how we live now, the novelist must take a good, hard look at the most central facts of contemporary life - technology and science.
Richard Powers
#59. A bad short story or novel or poem leaves one comparatively calm because it does not exist, unless it gets a fake prestige throughbeing mistaken for good work. It is essentially negative, it is something that has not come through. But over bad criticism one has a sense of real calamity.
Rebecca West
#60. The good thing about writing a novel is that you're creating an imaginary world and can take a break when you need to.
Liane Moriarty
#61. Recently SCHISMATRIX became my first novel to come out in Finland. Perhaps there's a quality in a good translation that can't be captured with the original.
Bruce Sterling
#62. There are a lot of very good New York novels, but there's no single all-encompassing novel, the way you could look at any number of Dickens books and say we know London as a result of that.
Pete Hamill
#63. Most people can start a short story or a novel. If you're a writer, you can finish them. Finish enough of them, and you may be good enough to be publishable.
Neil Gaiman
#64. It is clear that a novel cannot be too bad to be worth publishing ... It certainly is possible for a novel to be too good to be worth publishing.
George Bernard Shaw
#65. A good approach is to allow one dream per novel. Then, in the final revision, go back and get rid of that, too.
Howard Mittelmark
#66. A good biography is the richest experience. When you watch a TV series together with someone is like being in a novel with them.
Darcey Steinke
#67. It's like people don't only look good when they look like a magazine. People can be aesthetically beautiful in the way sunsets and leaves and things are.
Laura Tims
#68. I suppose it's why I usually loved to get lost in a good romance novel, because it would let me escape into the fantasy that I hoped to make come true one day. -Kate, Zack
Sawyer Bennett
#69. Good Lord. His appearance was nearly a caricature of the dark and brooding hero from every gothic novel.
Tarun Shanker
#70. Probably writers should forget what it was like to write the last novel, and the one before that, and the one before that, or we should all be plumbers. It must be good to be a plumber. Everyone is happy to see you, and no one reviews your work.
Susan Fromberg Schaeffer
#71. 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
#72. Once I had started, I discovered the secret pleasure of writing a novel. It's such an immersive, deep commitment. With short stories, you're continually having to start again from scratch, but with a novel you only need one good idea every few years.
Debra Dean
#73. I couldn't decide on a title for my first novel and my editor came up with Everything Good Will Come. After that, I thought I should name my own books.A Bit of Difference seems just right.
Sefi Atta
#74. Mattie, I'm sorry to drag you away." "Don't worry about it. It's late. My mother always said nothing good happens after midnight." I barked out a surprised laugh. "Your mother, clearly, is not a Sidhe.
Belinda M. Gordon
#75. It's good to go off and write a novel, but don't stop doing writing practice.
Natalie Goldberg
#76. Edward was good at finding Emil's most vulnerable places. Some people are like that. Siblings maybe most of all
Frances Greenslade
#77. You need a good James Clavell novel, I think, to make a good miniseries.
Noah Hawley
#78. I believe a novel must first of all be a good story. My hope is that the spiritual message is woven in so well, is such a part of the fabric of the story and of the characters' lives, that it is subtle but meaningful. This is difficult to do well and is something I constantly endeavor to improve.
Julie Klassen
#79. Surely the test of a novel's characters is that you feel a strong interest in them and their affairs the good to be successful, the bad to suffer failure. Well, in John Ward, you feel no divided interest, no discriminating interest you want them all to land in hell together, and right away.
Mark Twain
#80. It would ha' been a good deal easier, if ye'd only been a witch.
Diana Gabaldon
#81. If you want to write the next great novel, but you think, No, this won't work because no one will buy it or it won't be any good, then you talk yourself out of taking a risk.
John Tesh
#82. Good fiction must be entertaining, but what makes fiction special - and True - is that the realness of a novel allows it to carry a larger message.
Jerry B. Jenkins
#83. 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
#84. If I had to rank my skills, I have a long way to go before I can write a good graphic novel.
Ted Rall
#85. When I sit down to write a novel, I am exploring my own relationship with God, with the struggle between good and evil, my own purpose.
Ted Dekker
#86. The first novel I wrote was a monster - clocking in at 180,000 words - but it died a death, a death it deserved. It was called 'The Gods First Make Mad.' It was a good title, but it was the only good thing about the book. I didn't let that put me off.
Wilbur Smith
#87. I don't want to make a tea set. I want to make crystal, as the wonderful Billy Wiseass would put it. That poor bastard has it good: he's never experienced love. It'll be easy for him to write a romance novel.
Danilo Kis
#88. Hemingway is terribly limited. His technique is good for short stories, for people who meet once in a bar very late at night, but do not enter into relations. But not for the novel.
W. H. Auden
#89. In a novel, if you're any good, you don't just have good people or bad people. You have complicated people. You have real people.
Salman Rushdie
#90. Sometimes a girl's gotta be bad to be good.
Murder in the Dog Park
Jill Yesko
#91. In his exciting debut novel, Jerel Law transports readers to a place where supernatural forces of good and evil collide. Young readers will be entertained and inspired by Spirit Fighter. I heartily recommend it.
Robert Whitlow
#92. I always try to give good ratings to books I have read unless it is really bad. Being a writer I know how a bad rating feels. Sometimes it is better to encourage a writer rather than discourage them. After all the next book they write could be a World Renown novel like Harry Potter.
William Roach
#93. The mental state I'm in is completely different, but the act of trying to write is the same. I mean, in all instances you try to write good sentences. But in a novel you're free to do whatever you want, and in the autobiographical works you can't make things up.
Paul Auster
#94. Whether your audience is in a sweaty basement club or nestled in a favourite armchair, good money has been paid, and attention has got to be grabbed if you are not to be heckled off the stage or find your novel discarded in favour of the latest volume of 'Fifty Shades of Whatever.'
Mark Billingham
#95. I had never had a big opinion for myself. I had always thought I'd be a fuck up, that I'd be disappointed like always by life and people. But at this very moment, I knew it. I wasn't a good man, not well-adjusted. - Nolan
Stephanie Witter
#96. 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
#97. A lot of people have trouble with their second novel - the dreaded sophomore jinx. I wrote three books in between the two novels, and they just weren't very good.
Claire Cameron
#98. For me, a good YA novel is the best kind of comfort food.
Hallie Ephron
#99. My paintings have gotten to be pretty popular and I've taken a little bit more interest in painting the last few years. In fact, my novel that I wrote not too long ago, 'The Hornet's Nest,' I painted the cover picture for it and I do a good bit of painting now.
Jimmy Carter
#100. It would not be a good place for the heroine of a modern novel to stay at. The heroine of a modern novel is always "divinely tall," and she is ever "drawing herself up to her full height." At the "Barley Mow" she would bump her head against the ceiling each time she did this.
Jerome K. Jerome
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