Top 100 Quotes About Novel Reading
#1. She's a lovely young woman from upstate New York, but you should be very thankful for those romance-novel-reading, tween-movie-watching women. They've had a big hand in making our town a success." "And Julian's love life, once he learned to spray himself with glitter.
Kristen Painter
#2. Get your deprived, samall-town, romance-novel reading mind out of of the gutter, Becky.
Maureen A. Miller
#3. The dull people decided years and years ago, as everyone knows, that novel-writing was the lowest species of literary exertion, and that novel reading was a dangerous luxury and an utter waste of time.
Wilkie Collins
#4. It cannot but be injurious to the human mind never to be called into effort: the habit of receiving pleasure without any exertion of thought, by the mere excitement of curiosity, and sensibility, may be justly ranked among the worst effects of habitual novel-reading.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
#5. Nothing can hide from me the conviction that an immortal soul needs for its sustenance something more than visiting, and gardening, and novel-reading, and crochet-needle, and the occasional manufacture of sponge cake.
Thomas Wentworth Higginson
#6. Deprived of their newspapers or a novel, reading-addicts will fall back onto cookery books, on the literature which is wrapped around bottles of patent medicine, on those instructions for keeping the contents crisp which are printed on the outside of boxes of breakfast cereals. On anything.
Aldous Huxley
#7. Weak minds may be injured by novel-reading; but sensible people find both amusement and instruction therein.
Henry Ward Beecher
#8. All life was finally judged by this degree of irritation: abuse of things that were not natural, the sedentary life of cities, novel reading, theatergoing, immoderate thirst for knowledge,
Michel Foucault
#9. 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
#10. I don't have a lot of time. I can give a poem a couple of lines, a short story a paragraph, and a novel a few pages, then if I can stop reading without a sense of loss, I do, and I go on to something else.
Flannery O'Connor
#11. Speech recognition is utterly crap for writing fiction. If you try reading a novel aloud you'll soon figure out why - written prose style is utterly unlike the spoken word.
Charles Stross
#12. Reading is a private act, private even from the person who wrote the book. Once the novel is out there, the author is beside the point. The reader and the book have their own relationship now, and should be left alone to work things out for themselves.
Ann Patchett
#13. I spent the period reading the first novel assigned for English. And wow. If I hadn't realized I was in France yet, I do now. Because Like Water for Chocolate has sex in it. LOTS of sex.
Stephanie Perkins
#14. I've reread 'The Secret Garden' every year as an adult. I have a battered copy on my bookshelf - it's really quite a mess! The experience of reading the novel keeps deepening for me.
Ellen Potter
#15. One performs a very different act when reading a movie and when reading a novel. Your attention behaves differently.
Manuel Puig
#16. When you're reading a novel, I think the reason you care about how any given plot turns out is that you take it as a data point in the big story of how the world works. Does such-and-such a kind of guy get the girl in the end? Does adultery ever bring happiness? How do winners become winners?
Elif Batuman
#17. Sometimes I wonder if novel writers aren't completely f**ked in the head. ~ Drew Stirling
Jayden Hunter
#18. But now we live in a time and in a culture when mystery tends to mean something more answerable, it means a crime novel, a thriller, a drama on TV, usually one where we'll find out - and where the whole point of reading it or watching it will be that we will find out - what happened.
Ali Smith
#19. A few years ago, Cindy joined one of those dreadful reading groups, where unhappy, repressed middle class lesbians talk for five minutes about some novel they don't understand and then spend the rest of the evening moaning about how dreadful men are.
Nick Hornby
#20. When I'm really into a novel, I'm seeing the world differently during that time - not just for the hour or so in the day when I get to read. I'm actually walking around in a haze, spellbound by the book and looking at everything through a different prism.
Colin Firth
#21. Learning from books is so empowering - whether it be from history, a novel or a poem. When you come away from reading having learned something, you yourself are bigger.
Lisa Lucas
#22. I am no indiscriminate novel reader. The mere trash of the common circulating library I hold in the highest contempt.
Jane Austen
#23. My writing process hasn't changed - it's is the same whether I'm working on a Y.A. novel or, as now, a new novel for adults. A lot of reading, a lot of research if the subject warrants it, a lot of sticky notes and scraps of paper - and get to work.
Kathe Koja
#24. Good listeners always hear something novel
Ela Crain
#25. My first novel - the novel I wrote before 'Midnight's Children' - feels, to me, now, very - I mean, I get embarrassed when I see people reading it. You know, there are some people who, bizarrely, like it. Which I'm, you know, I'm happy for.
Salman Rushdie
#26. Who knows who you are ... A person is a novel: you don't know how it will end until the very last page. Otherwise, it wouldn't be worth reading to the very end ...
Yevgeny Zamyatin
#27. Certainly, we do not need to be soothed and entertained always like children. He who resorts to the easy novel, because he is languid, does no better than if he took a nap.
Henry David Thoreau
#28. Back at home they drew the curtains and read, with disapproval, with relish, with avidity and glee - even the ones who'd never thought of opening a novel before. There's nothing like a shovelful of dirt to encourage literacy.
Margaret Atwood
#29. Your understanding and interpretation of [a novel] is undoubtedly unique ... and that is the real beauty of the relationship that joins readers, books and writers together in a literary trinity - a bookish triumvirate.
Briar Kit Esme
#30. There are plenty of bad editors who try to impose their own vision on a book. ( ... )
A good novel editor is invisible.
Terri Windling
#31. When I was pregnant, I had the romantic idea that after the baby was born I would not only take up reading in earnest again, but also write a novel while my daughter slept in her Moses basket. Of course, I barely had time to keep up with my magazines until she started sleeping properly.
Kate Beckinsale
#32. 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
#34. Writing does not exist unless there is someone to read it, and each reader will take something different from a novel, from a chapter, from a line.
Claire Fuller
#35. You talk books away," he said; "why don't you write one?" "I am too fond of reading books to care to write them, Mr. Erskine. I should like to write a novel certainly, a novel that would be as lovely as a Persian carpet and as unreal.
Oscar Wilde
#36. You must write as if Dostoyevsky himself will be reading your novel, and Shakespeare will be acting it out.
Christina Westover
#37. Life is like reading a third-rate novel written overnight upside down by a crazy drunk.
You're not supposed to try to get it.
Said by E-Wan
Ji-Sang Shin
#38. Reading a novel was like returning to a once-beloved holiday destination.
Liane Moriarty
#39. The things that the novel does not say are necessarily more numerous than those it does say and only a special halo around what is written can give the illusion that you are reading also what is not written.
Italo Calvino
#40. I think predictability is built into any good novel in some way - you begin reading Anna Karenina and you know pretty much what's going to happen at the end. But that doesn't mean you know what's going to happen in the middle. For me, it's that sense of what happens in the middle that's important.
Scarlett Thomas
#41. Reading is fuel for the brain. Writing is fuel for the spirit ...
Megan S. Johnston
#42. Low and behold what comes of reading too many romance novels.
Kellyn Roth
#43. Besides it's not as though the prisoner can truly die, any more than a character in a novel can. You can always flip back to the first page, can't you?
Django Wexler
#45. For my part, the good novel of character is the novel I can always pick up; but the good novel of incident is the novel I can never lay down.
Agnes Repplier
#46. Like a junkie, I was jonesing for a romance novel coupling. I needed a pulsing pillar of passion, a mammoth mail member, a cocky cobra ready to tangle with my vaginal mongoose.
I also needed to think about upgrading my reading. My imagery was actually starting to bother me.
Alice Clayton
#47. People really want to think that these things really happened. I don't know why that important, but I know that when I finish reading a novel or something, I want to know how much of that really happened to this author.
Alison Bechdel
#48. Since I became a novelist I have discovered that I am biased. Either I think a new novel is worse than mine and I don't like it, or I suspect it is better than my novels and I don't like it.
Umberto Eco
#49. When I read a novel my imagination starts off at a gallop and leaves the narrator hidden in a cloud of dust; I have to come jogging twenty miles back to the denouement.
Henry James
#50. for the first time in a popular novel I was reading about wrongdoing by the then-sacred institution, the FBI. I was reading open criticism and accusation of J. Edgar Hoover himself. I was reading it not from the typewriter of a young radical but from that of an old novelist.
Rex Stout
#51. My next novel will be the third volume in the John Dies at the End series, and in fact may already exist, again depending on when you're reading this.
David Wong
#52. 'Just looking at pictures' used to be considered cheating. No longer. The graphic novel is booming. Comics, heavily illustrated texts, books with no words are now accepted as reading.
Jon Scieszka
#53. The counsellor who never reads a novel or never opens a book of poetry is neglecting an important resource for empathic development.
Dave Mearns
#54. As thoroughly as mankind has killed God, the reader has despatched the author.
Johnny Rich
#55. The most exciting part of writing a novel is when the characters take control of the story
Brandt Legg
#56. When you live outside prison walls, it may seem like life inside has a romanticized veneer on it, like you're watching a movie or reading a novel. When you live it, the veneer comes off.
Nesly Clerge
#57. I shove my reading matter back into my messenger bag (it's a novel about a private magician for hire in Chicago - your taxpayer pounds at work) and go to stand in the doorway.
Charles Stross
#58. Nothing was worse than reading too late and falling asleep two or three pages into a novel.
Ted Dekker
#59. The Airwitch had gone from reading nothing in his life to never stopping, buying every novel or history book he could get his hands on.
Susan Dennard
#60. And even with the book closed, the voices do not stop--there are echoes and reverberations that seem to leap off the pages and mischievously leave the novel tingling in our ears.
Azar Nafisi
#61. In the novel we can know people perfectly, and, apart from the general pleasure of reading, we can find here a compensation for their dimness in life.
E. M. Forster
#62. I didn't read comic books, growing up. I was more of a science fiction/fantasy novel guy. I loved reading Edgar Rice Burroughs' 'Tarzan' and that kind of stuff.
Jesse L. Martin
#63. One novel has been all my reading, Our Mutual Friend, one of the cleverest that Dickens has written.
Lewis Carroll
#64. Those words are from Lynda Barry's novel 'Cruddy.' I've carried them with me for some time. There's a lot in my life I wasn't expecting. One is the realization that I stood at this pulpit and delivered a reading for my own graduation ... 15 years ago. Unexpectedly, I'm old.
Jack Dorsey
#65. A novelist writes a novel, and people read it. But reading is a solitary act. While it may elicit a varied and personal response, the communal nature of the audience is like having five hundred people read your novel and respond to it at the same time. I find that thrilling.
August Wilson
#66. I write for those who desire, not publication at any cost, but publication one can be proud of
serious, honest fiction, the kind of novel that readers will find they enjoy reading more than once, the kind of fiction likely to survive.
John Gardner
#67. Nevil Shute's On the Beach is no Christmas carol, but it seems to me a remarkably fine novel, one which I read, in the peculiarly repulsive phrase, with my eyes glued to the page.
Dorothy Parker
#68. Before I was reading science fiction, I read Hemingway. Farewell to Arms was my first adult novel that said not everything ends well. It was one of those times where reading has meant a great deal to me, in terms of my development - an insight came from that book.
Robert Reed
#69. Poison Pill is a great reading. The novel ranges from Russian oligarchs to the American worlds of drug research and the equity markets, all of it in a mode of high suspense.
Scott Turow
#70. This is not a novel to be tossed aside lightly. It should be thrown with great force.
Dorothy Parker
#71. I think sometimes writers can get themselves into trouble trying to exert a totally controlled and super-knowing tone. This kind of knowingness is not the most promising tone to be sustained throughout a novel, to have a young woman who understands everybody and is always reading a room perfectly.
Rachel Kushner
#73. The fictional world seems larger, seems to have more dimension and richness when, for example, the protagonist from one novel you've read has a cameo role in another. I think that recognition is a very, very powerful phenomenon; it is one of the deepest and greatest pleasures of reading.
Paul Harding
#74. No matter how enormous a novel may become, the physical act of reading determines that there's no way it can become a communal experience. To read is intimate. It's almost masturbatory.
Jonathan Lethem
#75. You are about to begin reading Italo Calvino's new novel, If on a winter's night a traveler.
Italo Calvino
#76. I know I can be accused of sacrilege in writing about political economy in the style of a novel about love or pirates. But I confess I get a pain from reading valuable works by certain sociologists, political experts, economists and historians who write in code.
Eduardo Galeano
#77. I definitely want to act and I want to sing. If those two fall through, I want to become a writer, probably, like a songwriter for other people, or a novel writer. I write a lot, and I read a lot. I like reading fiction.
Cassie Steele
#78. But talking to a ghost about a demon when you're in a room full of people who can't see either of them is not to be recommended.
Kerstin Gier
#79. What are you reading?"
She replied without once taking her eyes off the page. "I am reading the sort of sentimental novel men dismiss as rubbish but could actually stand to learn a thing or two from."
"That's an awfully long title," he remarked dryly.
Maya Rodale
#80. Life must not be a novel that is given to us, but one that is made by us.
Novalis
#81. I'm reading Barnaby Rudge, one of the less well-known Dickens novels. I've been a life-long lover of Charles Dickens ever since I think A Tale of Two Cities was the first Dickens novel I read.
George Brandis
#82. Reading a novel of a private experience, very, very different, the nature of it is very different.
Sydney Pollack
#83. I love print fiction, but sometimes when I'm reading a good graphic novel or manga, I find myself envying those who work in an illustrated format.
Jane Lindskold
#84. But at some point Tengo noticed that returning to reality from the world of a novel was not as devastating a blow as returning from the world of mathematics.
Haruki Murakami
#85. In the '40s and '50s, a lot of teachers and librarians saw the graphic novel as the enemy of reading.
Gene Luen Yang
#86. Reading groups, readings, breakdowns of book sales all tell the same story: when women stop reading, the novel will be dead.
Ian McEwan
#88. Within months after reading the novel 'The Hunger Games,' I went from telling my mom that I could see myself as this character to actually getting the role. My mother reminds me that if I could manifest such an important role just because I wanted it so much, all of my dreams are possible.
Amandla Stenberg
#89. Sometime I'll get around to asking why the English nobility have so blasted many names that a conversation about them is like reading a Russian novel. I have a private suspicion it's done on purpose to confuse foreigners.
Jeanne M. Dams
#90. Reading a great novel gives the same feeling you have when you fall in love.
Luigina Sgarro
#91. She could have happily lived inside any nineteenth century novel.
Kate Atkinson
#92. One night she'd stayed up until dawn reading a particularly long novel, and she had been allowed to skip her chores and sleep away most of the next day.
Erika Johansen
#93. The return to a favorite novel is generally tied up with changes in oneself that must be counted as improvements, but have the feel of losses. It is like going back to a favorite house, country, person; nothing is where it belongs, including one's heart.
Mary McCarthy
#94. I have read all my novels that were translated into English. Reading my novels is enjoyable because I forget almost all the content in them.
Haruki Murakami
#95. Sure, 'Les Miserables' can be melodramatic. And seeing the musical instead of reading the novel will save you some time and spare you the long part where Hugo goes on and on about the Parisian sewer system. But I would hate for the novel to lose that.
Garth Risk Hallberg
#96. No one will ever write a horror novel as scary as reading about my symptoms on WebMD.
John Raptor
#97. People wonder why the novel is the most popular form of literature; people wonder why it is read more than books of science or books of metaphysics. The reason is very simple; it is merely that the novel is more true than they are.
G.K. Chesterton
#98. It is not mysterious to be home on a Saturday night, reading a novel in a pile of smelly golden retrievers.
E. Lockhart
#99. It's very silly," she said, "but I go on with it in spite of myself. I'm afraid I'm too easily pleased; no novel is so silly I can't read it.
Henry James
#100. Reading Claire Cooks novel is like eating some exotic dish about which you say, Wow, this is great! Whats in it? The ingredients here are: intelligence, humor, poignancy, revelation and, perhaps best of all, true originality. Ready to Fall seems to me to be ready to soar.
Elizabeth Berg
