Top 100 Quotes About Good Novels
#2. I think there's a false division people sometimes make in describing literary novels, where there are people who write systems novels, or novels of ideas, and there are people who write about emotional things in which the movement is character driven. But no good novels are divisible in that way.
Dana Spiotta
#3. Eat good dinners and drink good wine; read good novels if you have the leisure and see good plays; fall in love, if there is no reason why you should not fall in love; but do not pore over influenza statistics.
Jerome K. Jerome
#4. It seems to me that good novels celebrate the mystery in ordinary life, and summing it all up in psychological terms strips the mystery away.
Anne Tyler
#5. Whereas there are lots of good novels out there; there are a few good movies out there. People have been writing great poems for years, but there aren't a lot of good comics. I like trying to write them.
Neil Gaiman
#6. In real life, and usually in good novels and films, individuals are not defined only by their sexuality. Each has a history, and his or her eroticism is involved in a certain situation. It may even be that situation creates it.
Simone De Beauvoir
#7. Good novels are produced by people who voluntarily isolate themselves and go deep, and report from the depths on what they find.
Jonathan Franzen
#8. Good novels are not written, they are rewritten. Great novels are diamonds mined from layered rewrites.
Piers Paul Read
#9. It's with bad sentiments that one makes good novels.
Aldous Huxley
#10. I know that many writers have had to write under censorship and yet produced good novels; for instance, Cervantes wrote Don Quixote under Catholic censorship.
Guillermo Cabrera Infante
#11. I read novels with the utmost pertinaity. I look upon them - I look upon good novels - as a very valuable part of literature, conveying more exact and finely-distinguished knowledge of the human heart and mind than almost any other, with greater beadth and depth and fewer contraints.
Patrick O'Brian
#12. 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
#13. The best of fiction, as we know, of course, doesn't tell the truth; it tales the truth.
Criss Jami
#15. 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
#16. 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
#17. (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
#18. 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
#19. 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
#20. 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
#21. Just for tonight, let's pretend I'm not a priest and you're not crazy. We're just two normal human beings having a good time. Just a man and a woman at a rip-off carnival, living in the moment.
Nancee Cain
#22. I grew up reading 19th-century novels and late Victorian children's books, so I try for a good story full of coincidence and error, landscape and weather. However, the world was radically changed during my lifetime, and I tell of that battering as best I can.
Fanny Howe
#23. Henry James said there isn't any difference between "the English novel" and "the American novel" since there are only two kinds of novels at all, the good and the bad.
Eudora Welty
#24. I do think novels are overlooked. I did write one some years ago that I think is quite good, called 'The End of the Story,' not to blow my own horn.
Lydia Davis
#25. Live your life like the novels that you love to read. Only do the things that when you look back, you are proud of what you accomplished, feel good about how you treated others and didn't regret not doing to trying something. Every day is a new chapter, write something.
Taylor Berke
#26. I've worked out a Ninja Replacement Score for novels. It's basically the number of characters that need to be replaced by ninjas to make the book good.
Janni Lee Simner
#27. The fact is that most crime novels contain a good many punchlines. They are just rather darker than the ones you might hear in a comedy club.
Mark Billingham
#28. Carver's best book yet! FROM A CHANGELING STAR combines deft characterization and fascinating extrapolation into a complex, compulsively readable thriller. I wish all science fiction novels could be this good.
Craig Shaw Gardner
#29. 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
#30. Novels may teach us as wholesome a moral as the pulpit. There are "sermons in stones," in healthy books, and "good in everything.
Charles Caleb Colton
#31. Oh yeah, I grew up with comics. You know, I always like to describe myself as a 'narrative junkie.' I love novels, I love comics, movies, TV. If it's a good story, I'm hooked.
David Liss
#32. Thomas Mann used to write education novels and now you can write an education memoir, and there are all these memoirs coming out now about people's relationships with books. Like anything else, these can be good or bad. The genre doesn't make it good or bad, it's the execution.
Marco Roth
#33. She had an exciting job, several good friends, her cat, her peanut M&Ms, the mystery novels she was forever reading, and - well, me.
Tom Savage
#34. My hope is that my novels reflect the reality of a world where good and evil exist, imperfect people make mistakes, but a perfect Heavenly Father offers forgiveness and second chances.
Julie Klassen
#35. Fobbit is fast, razor sharp, and seven kinds of hilarious. Thank you, Mr. Abrams, for the much needed salve
it feels good to finally laugh about Iraq. Fobbit deserves a place alongside Slaughterhouse Five and Catch-22 as one of our great comic novels about the absurdity of war.
Jonathan Evison
#36. Why did you leave my hand? I've never felt so good, she thought. I felt good too, he thought.
Sara Naveed
#37. Some memories just stay. They just refuse to give up on staying. Maybe it is good that they stay. It helps us stay rooted. It helps us to know who we really are.
Aditi Bose
#38. 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
#39. A good editor is like tinsel to a Christmas Tree ... they add the perfect amount of sparkle without being gaudy.
Bobbi Romans
#40. I could practically hear the unspoken 'good girl' accompanied by a pat and scratch behind my ears like I was his obedient pet.
Melissa Aragon
#41. I measure my days by the number of homicidal thoughts I have. I only had two today. So it must have been good.
Lida Sideris
#42. People lose it when I say this, but I'm a novelist who doesn't read novels. There are lots of good reasons for not reading novels! I'm also a game writer who doesn't play games - I keep everything very separate. The only crossover with me is comics. I write them, and I read them passionately.
Karen Traviss
#43. I also once heard that if you have enough good ideas for three or four great novels, then what you probably have is actually enough ideas for one good one. That has stayed with me.
Darren White
#44. Good God, the man is dumber than Tink's dildo...
Kim Harrison
#45. I do not know whether the casual readers of novels is acquainted with an anatomical curiosity known as the femoral artery; without too much medical meandering, although you might suppose that cutting a man's throat would be the fastest way to slaughter him, a good jab to the thigh will do.
Lyndsay Faye
#46. Readers of a certain class are apt to call good the plot of that story in which "you can't tell what is going to happen next." But in some of the most tedious novels ever written you can't tell what is going to happen next--and you don't care a fig what is going to happen next.
Arnold Bennett
#47. Writing historical novels can be dangerous. We need to be as accurate and as fair about the historical record as we can be, at the same time as creating our fictional characters and, hopefully, telling a good story. The challenge is weaving the fiction into the history.
Edward Rutherfurd
#48. I felt that, in some ways, my novels lacked heart because of the distance between me and the subject matter. But no one wants to read a book based on good health, a happy upbringing, a long marriage.
Jim Crace
#49. Teaching an adolescent pixy and teenage gargoyle how to make explosives might not be such a good idea. But hell, he'd learned when he was five.
Kim Harrison
#50. I think reading the novels definitely was a good source for me to study from.
Laura Vandervoort
#51. You know you really have to beware of gypsies in these parts," he said teasingly, dismounting from his horse ... Keirah gave him a small smile that she didn't quite feel. "Good thing I have the Gwarda here to protect me," she teased back.
Madison Thorne Grey
#53. Shades of Grey. I haven't read it yet, but what you have to read carefully, is "Story of O" by the French writer Dominique Aury. This is actually the forerunner of all the whole SM novels and it's really good. You have to read it.
Theo Hutchcraft
#54. Yes, I was good at reading people. I studied them so I could put them in my novels.
Jennifer Echols
#55. I have written more than 100 novels and novellas since 1983 - I was first published in 1985. There was an overlap of three years with my teaching career, but finally I felt good enough about my writing career to quit teaching and write full time.
Mary Balogh
#56. You should spend more time reading the Good Book and less reading all those novels. What are you going to tell the Lord on Judgement Day when He asks you why you didn't read your bible? Hmm?
I will tell Him that His press agents could have done with a writing lesson or two, I said. To myself.
Jennifer Donnelly
#57. Often I think the novels I read won't make very good movies - I better not say which I'm looking at for potential films! - but it's nice to have an excuse to just sit and read for a whole day.
Christopher Hampton
#58. I loved her," Robinson said. "And I loved the sick girl you were when I met you, and I loved the good student and the bad driver. I loved the car thief, the hitchhiker, the quoter of novels I haven't read, and the hater of Slim Jims ... Axi Moore, I've loved every you there ever was.
James Patterson
#59. So he started writing these novels set in Small Town Georgia about folks with Good American Values who Fall in Love and then contract Life-Threatening Diseases and Die. I'm
Stephanie Perkins
#60. When you're 14, anything with a sword and a dragon is pretty cool. But when you're 21 and you've read 2,000 fantasy novels, you start to realize that some of those books, well, they weren't really good. OK, let's be honest. A lot of them were crap.
Patrick Rothfuss
#61. 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
#62. Poorly written novels
no matter how pious and edifying the behavior of the characters
are not good in themselves and are therefore not really edifying.
Flannery O'Connor
#63. He's an odd duck
but he's a good kid, with a good heart.
Lisa Scottoline
#64. Vayoo ansha."
I shook my head and whispered, "Never. For good and always, you have lost me. Na me lapay kah
Lahn. Not anymore."**
Kristen Ashley
#65. I don't see myself as a very important person. But I was the second woman to write a novel in Iran, and I have written most of the novels about Iranian women. In this way, maybe I have a good place in Iranian literature.
Shahrnush Parsipur
#66. All middle-class novels are about the trials of three, all upper-class novels about mass fornication, all revolutionary novels about a bad man turned good by a tractor.
Christina Stead
#68. When I start writing these novels, I go into them with a spirit of inquiry rather than to substantiate prejudices I had in the beginning. If you don't do that, you can't write good characters.
Ruth Ozeki
#69. Just as good books give me the joys of being alive, bad novels depress me, and as I notice this sentiment coming from the pages, I stop. I also do not hesitate to walk out of a movie house if the film is bad.
Orhan Pamuk
#70. I tell writers not to think about writing short stories or novels. Just write one good scene. And then a novel becomes a bunch of good scenes stacked on top of each other.
Joe Hill
#71. Three of my novels and a good number of my short stories are told from the point of view of men. I was brought up in a house of women.
Colm Toibin
#72. One of the things that I love about writing novels is that it really doesn't matter what next step you take as long as you're pursuing some intuition or instinct. Of course, then, intuitions or instincts don't make for great novels, but they often make for good first drafts.
Jonathan Safran Foer
#73. We only have one story. All novels, all poetry are built on the never-ending contest in ourselves of good and evil.
John Steinbeck
#74. Mostly it's lies, writing novels. You set out to tell an untrue story and you try to make it believable, even to yourself. Which calls for details; any good lie does.
Anne Tyler
#75. She didn't deserve me. She deserved a hell of a lot better than me, but so help me, I wasn't good enough of a man to just let her go.
Nicole R. Locker
#76. My wife has a good sense of humor, and instead of calling me psychic with my novels, she simply refers to me as being 'psycho.' That's because multiple things in my books have come true.
Brad Thor
#77. Who says only long tedious novels are good to read when all that can be summed up in one line
Priyansh Shah
#78. Others, amounting to four novels and a mess of short stories which I did not think worth preserving, I have done my best to eliminate from the record by refusing all requests for permission to reprint them, and I hope I have done a good job of making them hard to unearth.
Leslie Charteris
#79. 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
#80. Hello" and "good-bye" were a pair of bookends, propping up a vast library of blank volumes, void almanacs, novels full of sentiment I couldn't apprehend
Lauren Collins
#81. We read novels. We read hundreds of pages of words, when the story is good because we're willing to stay there. I hope the story is good. I'm going into this venture thinking that the audience is really smart and really wants to hear all the nuances of what we're saying.
Veena Sud
#82. I grew up in a community where it was not the exception to be a good girl. It was sort of expected. And all of my friends were good girls too, and my boyfriends were good boys. Everybody was pretty nice. And that affects how I write my characters. There aren't very many bad guys in my novels.
Stephenie Meyer
#83. You can't write a novel all at once, any more than you can swallow a whale in one gulp. You do have to break it up into smaller chunks. But those smaller chunks aren't good old familiar short stories. Novels aren't built out of short stories. They are built out of scenes.
Orson Scott Card
#84. I used to go with my parents and loved it, I was in school plays, and I started reading plays before I started reading novels. I'll defend it to the hilt. When theatre is good it is fabulous.
Patrick Marber
#85. It doesn't do to read too much,' Widmerpool said. 'You get to look at life with a false perspective. By all means have some familiarity with the standard authors. I should never raise any objection to that. But it is no good clogging your mind with a lot of trash from modern novels.
Anthony Powell
#86. The surprising thing is that so many teenage cancer novels are very good. John Green's 'The Fault in Our Stars,' recently published by Penguin, was voted 'Time Magazine's book of the year in 2012 ahead of Hilary Mantel and Zadie Smith.
Mal Peet
#87. [Property] is a brilliant, chillingly revelatory piece of fiction, a work of craft, economy and such good merciless observation-one of those rare, crucial novels illuminating a history we think we know and understand so that after we've read it we'll never forget its truths.
Ali Smith
#88. A surprising number [of novels] have been read aloud to me, and I like all if moderately good, and if they do not end unhappily-against which a law ought to be passed.
Charles Darwin
#89. A good novel, one which entices the author as much as it beckons the reader.
W.J. Raymond
#91. If it feels good, enjoy it. If it doesn't, adjust your position until it does.
Amy Lane
#92. Once I started writing novels, I understood how hard it was to write really good short stories.
Elizabeth McCracken
#93. How dare that arrogant prick come in here and ruin her perfectly good day? And not to mention the miserable judge, who should have called in sick this morning if he thought the world was such an awful place.
Tanya Thistleton
#94. I've never been good with deadlines. My early novels, I wrote by myself. No one knew I was writing a novel; I didn't have a contract.
George R R Martin
#95. Do not fear to put novels into the hands of young people as an occasional holiday experiment, but above all, good poetry in all kinds,
epic, tragedy, lyric. If we can touch the imagination, we serve them; they will never forget it.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#96. Cinema isn't just a good medium for translating graphic novels. It's specifically a good medium for superheroes. On a fundamental, emotional level, superheroes, whether in print or on film, serve the same function for their audience as Golden Age movie stars did for theirs: they create glamour.
Virginia Postrel
#97. When I was in college, I had the good fortune to have Joyce Carol Oates as my writing teacher. She told me that I could take an aspect of myself, and from that one bit of personality, I can create a character. This is what I have done, particularly in my novels.
Jonathan Ames
#98. I don't write poetry or short stories. I don't like to write articles usually. I tend to really only want to be focused on writing novels. It's one of the real advantages I've had over the years. I've only been good at one thing. It helps to be limited.
Markus Zusak
#99. I was brought up to think that women were inhibited, but they sure are not with me. I guess I am lucky or there is something about me that makes them feel totally comfortable, open, and expressive. I don't mind; it feels good and the rest unfolds naturally.
J.F. Kelly
#100. If I can keep writing just one good page a day, I will have 15 published novels in my expected lifetime. Tick, tick, tick...
Barry James Hickey
