Top 91 Quotes About Great Novels
#1. Every true novelist listens for that suprapersonal wisdom, which explains why great novels are always a little more intelligent than their authors. Novelists who are more intelligent than their books should go into another line of work.
Milan Kundera
#2. The great novels have marched with the years. They are the contemporaries of time.
Ellen Glasgow
#4. Well, the medium of film is so different than a book that just by bringing it into visual storytelling is to change it up. I think in a book, in any book, you can have a reactive character. Some of the great novels of all time have had that, but in a film you can't do that.
Melissa Rosenberg
#5. I haven't the stature to critique one of our literature's great novels, Tobias; and I'm not one of those who believe The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn needs critiquing for literary or social reasons.
Norman Lock
#7. All great novels, all true novels, are bisexual.
Milan Kundera
#8. There are now 30-year-old Mexican writers who do great novels in which Mexico isn't even mentioned.
Carlos Fuentes
#9. Empathy lies at the heart of Gatsby, like so many other great novels
the biggest sin is to be blind to others' problems and pains. Not seeing them means denying their existence.
Azar Nafisi
#10. In high school, my English teacher Celeste McMenamin introduced me to the great novels and Shakespeare and taught me how to write. Essays, poetry, critical analysis. Writing is a skill that was painful then but a love of mine now.
Aaron Lazar
#11. The light that radiates from the great novels time can never dim, for human existence is perpetually being forgotten by man and thus the novelists' discoveries, however old they may be, will never cease to astonish.
Milan Kundera
#12. I think literature has lost it's power. Great novels continue to be written, but they are no longer changing the world.
Don DeLillo
#13. We have looked for myths that include us in great novels, music, the latest comic book, or even some stupid advertising campaign. We'll look *anywhere* for a mythology that embraces people like ourselves.
Kate Bornstein
#14. Great novels are above all great fairy tales ... literature does not tell the truth but makes it up.
Vladimir Nabokov
#15. I had 'Push' and 'The Paperboy' next to my bed for many years. Those are some of the great, great novels.
Lee Daniels
#16. Good novels are not written, they are rewritten. Great novels are diamonds mined from layered rewrites.
Piers Paul Read
#17. All the great novels are about obsession and people who are obsessed.
Marty Rubin
#18. I used to feel an obligation to invent things. I felt I was a failure because I didn't do massive great novels about Australia or the outback or something. I just don't feel that any more.
Helen Garner
#19. Critics are not creators. They rarely write great novels, invent new technologies, or come up with a great business idea.
Jacqueline Leo
#20. I have no desire to write historical anything or futuristic anything - I want to find a way to get at the essence of what it's like to be alive now. The reason why great novels from centuries ago are still great is because that's what they were doing; it's like a message from another culture.
Jonathan Dee
#21. They say great themes make great novels.. but what these young writers don't understand is that there is no greater theme than men and women.
John O'Hara
#22. Do we consider that anything goes, that we have no responsibility towards others but only for satisfying our needs?
Well, that is the crux of the great novels xxx - the question of doing what is right or what we want to do.
Azar Nafisi
#23. 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
#24. The rise of the dramas in the thirteenth century, and the rise of the great novels in a later period, together with their frank glorification of love and the joys of life, may be called the Third Renaissance.
Hu Shih
#25. 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
#26. At Oxford University, I studied languages so I could read the great novels as they were originally written. I took what in the United States would be a double major in Russian and French, but I have to admit that the pressure of getting through so many books spoiled reading for me.
Kate Beckinsale
#27. All the great novels, all the great films, all the great dramas are fictions that actually tell us the truth about us or about human nature or about human situations without being tied into the minutia of documentary events. Otherwise we might as well just make documentaries.
Jeremy Northam
#28. Fiction had never been Jackson's thing. Facts seemed challenging enough without making stuff up. What he discovered was that the great novels of the world were about three things - death, money and sex. Occasionally a whale.
Kate Atkinson
#29. I read Susanna Clarke's Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, which I think will subsequently be recognized as one of the first great novels of the 21st century.
Lev Grossman
#30. Great novels are always a little more intelligent than their authors.
Milan Kundera
#31. It is the sex of the novels and not that of their authors that must interest us. All great novels, all true novels are bisexual. This is to say that they express both a feminine and a masculine vision of the world. The sex of the authors as physical people is their private affair.
Milan Kundera
#32. The next time you're mad at me, talk to me,' he said. 'Don't shut me out. I don't like playing games. And by the way, I had a great time, too.
Nicholas Sparks
#33. The great thing about novels is that you can be as unshy as you want to be. I'm very polite in person. I don't want to talk about startling or upsetting things with people.
Nicholson Baker
#34. I do not repeat conversations that I can't remember. And it's something that irritates me a great deal, because I think most memoirs are false novels.
Paul Auster
#35. An artist doesn't really need a great deal of experience. One heartbreak can produce many novels. But you have to have a heart that can break.
Brian Morton
#36. 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
#37. Great writers experience their dreams. They put them on paper, where others can read about them.
Ellen J. Barrier
#38. Lying for lying's sake is the inspiration behind all great fiction.
Marty Rubin
#39. These two "speech communities," as it were, are Hurston's great sources of inspiration not only in her novels but also in her autobiography.
Zora Neale Hurston
#40. I never accepted why there should be some invisible, wavy cutoff line separating Great Fiction from phosphorescent beauties and dollhouse miniatures, novels that contain a whole world in a snow globe.
James Wolcott
#41. Get Carter remains among the great crime novels, a lean, muscular portrait of a man stumbling along the hard edge - toward redemption. Ted Lewis cuts to the bone.
James Sallis
#42. Atticus Lish is a true original and this is a tremendous book, relentless, moving, written in prose of marvelous integrity. Now that America and the novel are dead, I hope we can have more great American novels as alive as this one.
Sam Lipsyte
#43. The truly great books are always novels: 'Anna Karenina,' 'The Brothers Karamazov,' 'The Magic Mountain.' Just as with 'Shahnameh,' I browse these books from time to time to remember how a great book works on us or to teach my students at Columbia University.
Orhan Pamuk
#44. When I was a teenager, I thought how great it would be if only I could write novels in English. I had the feeling that I would be able to express my emotions so much more directly than if I wrote in Japanese.
Haruki Murakami
#45. To those great geniuses now in petticoats, who shall write novels for the beloved reader's children, these men and things will be as much legend and history as Nineveh, or Coeur de Lion, or Jack Sheppard.
William Makepeace Thackeray
#46. Mollie Hunter was both a great friend and a very fine writer for children. She was fascinated by Scotland's history and its folklore - almost all her novels reflect her tremendous knowledge of both.
Joan Lingard
#47. Books are great for if you want to work on the craft of writing for yourself, or, you know, to write novels or indie films, stuff like that.
Thomas Lennon
#48. There, Clover found the "gardens and great trees and old cottages ... so beautiful" that seeing them exhausted her. It was as if, she joked with her husband, "this English world is a huge stage-play got up only to amuse Americans. It is obviously unreal, eccentric, and taken out of novels.
Natalie Dykstra
#49. Post-apocalyptic novels tell you that in the future there is some great war. I would tell you that most cops say that it's going on right now.
Lisa Gardner
#50. I never thought I would become amazing. I never thought I would be as great as my father. I would like to continue writing novels, and hopefully, at some point, I would like to make the switch from being 'Stephen Hawking's daughter' to 'novelist Lucy Hawking,' and that will be a fabulous day.
Lucy Hawking
#51. Chekhov was a great writer, but not all novels have to follow his rules. Not all guns in stories have to be fired, Tamaru
Haruki Murakami
#52. How do our experiences in childhood make us the adults we become? It is one of the great human questions, the theme of countless novels, biographies, and memoirs;
Paul Tough
#53. It doesn't take five novels to become a great writer ... it takes one novel rewritten five different times.
B. Chancellor Burgweger
#54. I have learned a great deal from novels. Some of it is even true.
Dean Koontz
#55. [A] great novel will allow you to transcend the social, racial and political limitations imposed by the vicissitudes of life and to find a deep fraternity based on empathy.
Azar Nafisi
#56. French novels generally treat of the relations of women to the world and to lovers, after marriage; consequently there is a great deal in French novels about adultery, about improper relations between the sexes, about many things which the English public would not allow.
Lafcadio Hearn
#57. Yugoslavia was a kind of superpower. Great movies. Beautiful novels. Great rock-and-roll. We became a superpower in basketball. The problem is that people needed to identify more strongly with it after Tito and his awful, tricky way of leading the country.
Emir Kusturica
#58. The first drafts of my novels have all been written in longhand, and then I type them up on my old electric. I have resisted getting a computer because I distrust the whole PC thing. I don't think a great book has yet been written on computer.
J.G. Ballard
#59. I never got any training in how to write novels as an English major at Oberlin, but I got some great training for writing novels from anthropology and from Margaret Mead.
Alan Furst
#60. By using novels, I show ordinary kids confronting and overcoming great odds.
Lurlene McDaniel
#61. The 1930s birthed two great agrarian novels: 'Gone with the Wind' from the viewpoint of the ruling class, 'The Grapes of Wrath' for the underclass. And both were turned into movies that dared to be true to the books' controversial themes.
Richard Corliss
#62. People live for love. They kill for love. They die for love. They have songs, poems, novels, sculptures, paintings, myths, legends. It's one of the most powerful brain systems on Earth for both great joy and great sorrow.
Helen Fisher
#63. Eucalyptus. Murray Bail. Someone told me that this was a great novel so I bought it, but then I discovered that it was great Australian novel so I put it away. I find it difficult to get to grips with Australian novels. Difficult, but not impossible.
Susan Hill
#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. 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
#66. Mervyn Peake is a finer poet than Edgar Allan Poe, and he is therefore able to maintain his world of fantasy brilliantly through three novels. It (Gormenghast trilogy) is a very, very great work ... a classic of our age.
Mervyn Peake
#67. Nothing's changed. When people read The Highwayman , they see it all in their heads. Their imagination is way more powerful than anything you can throw onto the screen. Look at the great graphic novels they've already butchered.
Glenn Benest
#68. Great, big, serious novels always get awards. If it's a battle between a great, big, serious novel and a funny novel, the funny novel is doomed.
Neil Gaiman
#69. The worst part of writing is meeting all these great new characters and having no one to talk about (the adventures you share with) them.
Claudia Bakker
#70. 'Great Expectations' was an important novel in my adolescence. It was very much one of those emblematic novels that made me wish I could write like that. It helped that my models as a writer were dead over a hundred years before I began to write.
John Irving
#71. The degree of talent, the size of the gift, is immaterial. All artists must listen, but not all hear great symphonies, see wide canvasses, conceive complex, character-filled novels. No
matter, the creative act is the same, and it is an act of faith.
Madeleine L'Engle
#72. Exactly. Chekhov was a great writer, but not all novels have to follow his rules. Not all guns in stories have to be fired, Tamaru said.
Haruki Murakami
#73. 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
#74. I think the internet is a great marketing tool
but marketing is not my job. I'm a writer. My job is to write novels.
Bentley Little
#75. Raphael said, "There are no tears in Heaven, no chances of a broken heart. Maybe being witness to great love is why I love coming to Earth. And maybe true love is why some angels choose to stay.
D.F. Jones
#76. My first three books, the collections, were fun to write and a great start but I have matured so much as a writer since then and am extremely proud of the Detective Byone novels- they will be my legacy!
Ricardo M. Fleshman
#77. You'll notice that my books offer great variety. Some are for adults, some for children and some for teens. There are mysteries, historical novels, picture books, love stories and stories of crisis and courage.
Sonia Levitin
#78. He had great respect for a novelist like James. Pound knew about the concentration of energies required to write novels and also knew that he did not have such qualities, that his inspirations came more in flashes than in sustained work. Writing prose was difficult,
John Tytell
#79. I always read a lot as a kid and I'd spend long periods of time in my room reading ... I wasn't reading anything great until I got older, but I used to read Agatha Christie mysteries and all of Ian Fleming's 'James Bond' novels.
Michael Riedel
#80. Comic books and graphic novels are a great medium. It's incredibly underused.
Darren Aronofsky
#81. Travel books are all sorts - some are autobiographies, some are about falling in love. Some are about having great meals, some are about suffering. There are as many different kinds of travel books as there are novels. People think a travel book is one thing. It's many things.
Paul Theroux
#82. We never looked quite right on paper, but that's what made us so great. We were exactly what we wanted to be ... and that was happy.
Hope Alcocer
#83. You mustn't hit her over the head with it. Women like to be romanced like the heroines in the sensation novels." "What the devil do you know about sensation novels?" "A man can learn a great deal about women from novels," Matt said. "You should try it sometime.
Amanda Quick
#84. Or you can start by declaring that novels can no longer be written, and then, behind your own back as it were, produce a mighty blockbuster that establishes you as the last of the great novelists.
Gunter Grass
#85. 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
#86. If the novels are still being read in 50 years, no one is ever going to say: 'What's great about that sixth book is that he met his deadline!' It will be about how the whole thing stands up.
George R R Martin
#87. We trust to novels to train us in the practice of great indignations and great generositie.
Henry James
#88. There are not many English novels which deserve to be called great: Parade's End is one of them.
W. H. Auden
#89. Read. Read. Read. Read. Read great books. Read poetry, history, biography. Read the novels that have stood the test of time. And read closely.
David McCullough
#90. When an author creates a town in her novels, she spends a great deal of time visualizing the streets and buildings, landmarks and topography. And while the town becomes real in her imagination, it's rare for an author to see the place she's created actually spring to life.
Lori Wilde
#91. To me, comedians are the last great storytellers because they depict their stories and create their effect with so few words. In the span of a couple minutes, stand-up comics can communicate more emotion than most novels do in hours worth of reading.
Chuck Palahniuk
