Quotes About Novels

#1. I think one of the primary goals of a feminist landscape architecture would be to work toward a public landscape in which we can roam the streets at midnight, in which every square is available for Virginia Woolf to make up her novels

Rebecca Solnit

#2. With every sentence she writes, Davis freshens the senses. Her novels achieve a tone that's unlike anyone else's, creating an atmosphere you don't so much interpret as breathe.

Kevin Brockmeier

#3. The books that really made an impact on me were not set in New Zealand. Some were New Zealand novels, but the New Zealandness of them was not what carried me or excited me.

Eleanor Catton

#4. It doesn't take five novels to become a great writer ... it takes one novel rewritten five different times.

B. Chancellor Burgweger

#5. I hope my novels will allow you to become lost in a world totally unlike the actual world we live in. I work hard to make the words evoke particular images, thoughts, feelings, the mystery of relationships.

Jay Neugeboren

#6. It is quite beneath the dignity of a person holding a Bachelor of Arts degree to engage in such a vulgar occupation as the writing of novels.

Fukuzawa Yukichi

#7. I'd love to see more novels and short stories where the characters have their own folklore that isn't the Plot-Bearing Prophecy of Doom.

Marie Brennan

#8. While the subject matter of my novels could not be further removed from the stuff I used to trot out at the Comedy Store, the delivery of the material employs many of the same techniques.

Mark Billingham

#9. She said writting novels was like childbirth: if you truly remembered how awful it got, you'd never do it again.

Sarah Dessen

#10. I hope people will like my novels after I'm dead. And I hope my children think about me in good ways, by and large.

Clyde Edgerton

#11. I strongly believe that the art of the novel works best when the writer identifies with whoever he or she is writing about. Novels in the end are based on the human capacity, compassion, and I can show more compassion to my characters if I write in a first person singular.

Orhan Pamuk

#12. I like to read dramatic novels and I absolutely love magazines.

Maud Welzen

#13. When I write, I get glimpses into future novels.

Patricia Briggs

#14. I'm just interested in serialization in fiction. I'm fascinated by it. I love the 19th-century novels. I'm interested in ways to bring that back to fiction.

Jennifer Egan

#15. If there's anything Trollope novels always take seriously, it is money - how it flows from one character to another, how it is managed, who has it, who deserves it, and what it means to a character, male or female.

Jane Smiley

#16. I never plot out my novels in terms of the tone of the book. Hopefully, once a story is begun it reveals itself.

Alice Hoffman

#17. The highest praise a writer can give another is to say he wishes he had written his book. I wish I had written Forty Words for Sorrow. Giles Blunt has a tremendous talent. If you miss Forty Words for Sorrow, you'll miss one of best novels of 2001.

Tony Hillerman

#18. Poetry and novels are lists of our devotions. We love the feel of making the marks as the feelings are rising and falling.

Eileen Myles

#19. Perhaps there are only a few women who experience without deception the overwhelming intoxication of the senses which they expectfrom their encounters with men, which they feel bound to expect because of the fuss made about it in novels, written by men.

Max Frisch

#20. Nobody told me how hard it was going to be to get published. I wrote four novels that nobody wanted, sent them out all over, collected hundreds and hundreds of rejection slips.

Jerry Spinelli

#21. Novels are not about expressing yourself, they're about something beautiful, funny, clever and organic. Self-expression? Go and ring a bell in a yard if you want to express yourself.

Zadie Smith

#22. The 'Barnaby' books were always intended to be graphic novels.

Janet Evanovich

#23. When I was little, my grandma used to get romance novels, and she would get hundreds of these, and she'd read a dozen a month.

Chuck Palahniuk

#24. Novels are read
Or their authors are blue.
Support Indie writers:
Buy their books, post reviews!

Cheri Gillard

#25. Between fourteen and nineteen, I must have begun and abandoned six novels.

Gore Vidal

#26. No one in a novel by Virginia Woolf ever filled up the petrol tank of her car. No one in Hemingway's postwar novels ever worried about the effects of prolonged exposure to the threat of nuclear war.

J.G. Ballard

#27. Novels have much more space than short stories, which gives you more leeway with the number of characters you can include. Even 'furniture' characters can be described and given speaking parts to develop background or atmosphere.

Nancy Kress

#28. I would have to say the novel 'War and Peace' influenced me more than any other book. This greatest of novels demonstrated to me the enormous power of literature and fired me up with a desire to become a writer, to participate in what I considered then to be the greatest of all endeavors.

Douglas Preston

#29. I have heard of novels started in the middle, at the end, written in patches to be joined together later, but I have never felt the slightest desire to do this.

C.S. Forester

#30. I have learned a great deal from novels. Some of it is even true.

Dean Koontz

#31. The closest to my heart is not just one book - it's the whole series of novels, Indigo Diaries. The first volume, "Gods' Food," is already available in English.

Sahara Sanders

#32. Mark Helprin and Lawrence Durrell, both of whom write fat and florid novels that appall me now but opened my eyes to the power of fiction when I was in my 20s.

Kevin Patterson

#33. When you're my age and you see a story, you better go for it pretty quickly. I'd just like to get a few more novels under my belt.

John Le Carre

#34. I think literature has lost it's power. Great novels continue to be written, but they are no longer changing the world.

Don DeLillo

#35. I believe there are two ways of writing novels. One is making a sort of musical comedy without music and ignoring real life altogether; the other is going deep down into life and not caring a damn ...

P.G. Wodehouse

#36. 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

#37. I had always been literary, in the sense of loving poetry and discovering novels, but I found my voice, as they say, in an office full of elderly people who looked after blind ex-servicemen.

Andrew O'Hagan

#38. And I realize now that the two main themes of my novels were stated by my siblings: 'Here I am, cleaning shit off of practically everything' and 'No pain.

Kurt Vonnegut

#39. Ridley Pearson also plays bass guitar and sings with the Rock Bottom Remainders, a band made up of such successful authors as Amy Tan, Stephen King, and Dave Barry-a band that, according to Barry, "plays music as well as Metallica writes novels".

Otto Penzler

#40. Novels are make-believe and play for adults.

Mohsin Hamid

#41. There was a time in my life when I wasn't sure I'd ever write a short story again because I had started writing novels, and I am fundamentally a lazy person, and the fact is that a novel is a lazy person's form, really. That is, you can amble; you can digress.

Elizabeth McCracken

#42. I love epistolary novels and became wildly excited when the form presented itself to me.

Maria Semple

#43. I don't take much stock of detectives in novels - chaps that do things and never let you see how they do them. That's just inspiration: not business.

Arthur Conan Doyle

#44. I'd probably play games obsessively if I didn't write, although I admit I don't read novels partly because I don't enjoy it, not just because it's the wrong side of the creator-consumer barrier for me. I'm a visual writer. I think in moving 3D images and write down what I observe.

Karen Traviss

#45. It seems to me that the novel as a medium has a very low signal-to-noise ratio. By which I mean: there are a lot of novels published, but the vast majority of them don't represent major contributions to the medium.

Lev Grossman

#46. I think, above all, the characters in my novels feel universal to the readers.

Nicholas Sparks

#47. I am delighted if people find that kind of sustenance in novels, but perhaps it's because they don't read the Scripture that they are comparing it to, which would perhaps provide deeper sustenance than many contemporary novels.

Marilynne Robinson

#48. All my novels are very much directly related to my inner life, even though I'm inventing characters, even though it's fiction, even though it's make-believe, it nevertheless is coming out of the deepest recesses of myself.

Paul Auster

#49. I like the idea of making big budget films with a heart. I like graphic novels more than comic books.

Matthew Vaughn

#50. For novelists, the imagination is everything. The trick is to guide one's imagination using research. I love using old maps. When I wrote my novels on London and New York, I found wonderful historical atlases. Paris has the most lavish maps of all.

Edward Rutherfurd

#51. Well, writing was what I wanted to do, it was always what I wanted to do. I had novels to write so I wrote them.

Octavia E. Butler

#52. In novels, women run off with their lovers. In real life, women stay.

Kim Wright

#53. I like those very realistic paintings that look like photographs, or novels that are so much like actual life that you feel understood.

Deb Caletti

#54. I don't like novels that tie everything up in a plot-y way. I always think that's not really true of life, particularly of people in power.

Sarah Hall

#55. Novels
which, after all, are training grounds for responding to the world, imaginative sanctuaries in which to hone and test our ethical judgments and choices.

William Deresiewicz

#56. Oh, I'm nerdy about science fiction and fantasy and graphic novels and reading, and I'm nerdy about board games. My favorite board game is a board game I'm working on right now. It's a game of Napoleonic era naval warfare, and it's going to be fun.

Billy Campbell

#57. Seven of my novels take place in the Southwest, in the Four Corners area which has been my home since 1973. I know these mountains, rivers, mesas and canyons well, so it's been natural for me to draw on my own personal experiences here.

Will Hobbs

#58. Mary reached into her vinyl purse and extracted one of the novels, each of whose covers had promised laughter and tears. She began to read and, finding a masterful storyteller behind its pages, was instantly and gratefully transported to another place.

Lori Lansens

#59. My life is in these books. Read these and know my heart. We are not quire novels. We are not quite short stories. In the end, we are collected works.

Gabrielle Zevin

#60. The best novels are those that are important without being like medicine; they have something to say, are expansive and intelligent but never forget to be entertaining and to have character and emotion at their centre.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

#61. I'd reached the point where if a character in one of the novels I was reading happened to be eating, I had to skip over the scene because it simply hurt too much to read about what I wanted and couldn't have. I

Cheryl Strayed

#62. 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

#63. Novels, in my experience, are slow in coming, and once I've begun them I know I have years rather than months of work ahead of me.

Graham Swift

#64. I don't know if foreigners will take to my novels or not. It may be that my books appeal only to a particular gender or age group rather than convey a more universal appeal.

Natsuo Kirino

#65. Call me territorial or narcissistic, but I avoid novels about people who share my vocation.

Julia Glass

#66. I was incredibly determined - I wrote short stories, I wrote the beginnings of novels. I wrote a little children's book and sent it to the editor-in-chief of the children's division of Simon and Schuster and she asked me to write a little children's book for a series she was doing.

Candace Bushnell

#67. Worst of all were the highly unlikely science-fiction novels, or the equally implausible futuristic tales.
Couldn't my mom and Nana Victoria see for themselves that I was both mystified and frightened by life on Earth?

John Irving

#68. Ideas take root at the oddest moments. Some grow into novels, the weaker ones wither and die.

Pippa DaCosta

#69. There are plenty of brilliant people who are too stressed out to read challenging literary novels.

John Burdett

#70. True stories, autobiographical stories, like some novels, begin long ago, before the acts in the account, before the birth of some of the people in the tale.

Harold Brodkey

#71. In novels, and American novels in particular, it's not just about redemption, it's about forward movement and healing oneself. Americans are very big on getting better.

Hanya Yanagihara

#72. Half the point in reading novels and seeing plays and films is to exercise the faculty of sympathy with our own kind, so often obliterated in the multifarious controls and compulsions of actual social existence.

Germaine Greer

#73. Novels have become equally important to me as films. I consider myself a storyteller and passionately engaged in both of those disciplines.

Rebecca Miller

#74. I've done a lot of books with Asian antecedents to them - some of my fantasy novels have been that way, and certainly in the 'Battletech' universe, there's a lot of Asian culture in that.

Michael A. Stackpole

#75. The beauty of my work is that my sets cost nothing. That's what I love about being a writer of novels.

Markus Zusak

#76. People assume that science is a very cold sort of profession, whereas writing novels is a warm and fuzzy intuitive thing. But in fact, they are not at all different.

Diana Gabaldon

#77. I love getting cookbooks - people will give them to me, and I read them like novels and file everything away.

Gwyneth Paltrow

#78. I've loved 'Vanity Fair' since I was 16 years old. You know, we're all colonial hangovers in India, steeped in English literature. It is one of these novels that I read under the covers at my convent boarding school in Simla.

Mira Nair

#79. Last time I was in London, I visited Number 5, Bruton Street, which is the address I gave to Violet Bridgerton, the matriarch of the Bridgerton clan in my novels. It was a bit disconcerting to learn that it's actually a pub.

Julia Quinn

#80. I work seven days a week, from 9 in the morning till 8 at night. I have the titles of the next eight novels I want to write. I feel myself pitiable, degraded on a day that I don't write.

Orhan Pamuk

#81. The theatre has always been voraciously omnivorous. Dramatists have always raided every medium to find grist to their mill: myths, folk tales, newspapers, novels, films, works of art of all kinds.

Lee Hall

#82. I've written only two novels, but they're both long ones, and they each took a decade to write.

Donna Tartt

#83. The bookcase was filled with computer games, history books, and sci-fi novels in about equal proportions. Odd reading choices, maybe, but I just thought of it as past and future history.

Mike Mullin

#84. Mr Earbrass escaped from Messrs Scuffle and Dustcough, who were most anxious to go into all the ramifications of a scheme for having his novels translated into Urdu, and went to call on a distant cousin.

Edward Gorey

#85. When you get inside a literary novel you feel that the author, more often than not, just doesn't know enough about things. They haven't been around enough - novelists never go anywhere. Once I discovered true books about real things - books like 'How To Run a Company' - I stopped reading novels.

Peter York

#86. I don't write tracts, I write novels. I'm not a preacher, I'm a fiction writer.

Ursula K. Le Guin

#87. Old soldiers never die, they write novels.

James Jones

#88. The novels we read allow us to encounter possible persons, versions of ourselves hat we would never see, never permit ourselves to see, never permit ourselves to become, in places we can never go and might not care to, while assuring that we get to return home again

Thomas C. Foster

#89. There are a lot of snobs out there who disregard these books (romance novels), but they fulfil a need. I am happy and fulfilled in what I am doing and readers love them. And why not? They are harmless and they are fun.

Sara Craven

#90. In winter I like sprawling novels, full of conflict and intrigue, and during the bleakest, coldest days of December I holed up with Nicola Griffith 's Hild, a book of love and sex and war and religious upheaval, and I recommend it even over the warmest pair of Sorels.

Maud Newton

#91. History is present in all my novels. And whether I am directly talking about the sociological moment or just immersing my character in the environment, I am very aware of it.

Paul Auster

#92. I just reached the point where plot-driven novels don't hold my interest because I don't care about the fate of characters anymore - whether Emily marries Tom or not, that kind of thing.

Billy Collins

#93. John DeChancie is a popular author of numerous science fiction/fantasy novels including the hugely entertaining CASTLE series and STARRIGGER trilogy. He lives in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

John DeChancie

#94. Within my own life, I read all the beloved novels by lamps of vegetable oil; I saw the Standard Oil invading my own village, I saw gas lamps in the Chinese shops in Shanghai; and I saw their elimination by electric lights.

Hu Shih

#95. In effect I am not a novelist, but rather a failed essayist who started to write novels because he didn't know how to write essays.

Jose Saramago

#96. To the question: How do the authors of sketches, stories and novels get along in life, the following answer can or must be given: They are stragglers and they are down at heel.

Robert Walser

#97. I'm superstitious about the paper that I use, for example. I've written all my novels on a paper of a particular size with lines of a particular distance apart and with two holes in the paper for the folder clip.

Philip Pullman

#98. The strange thing, though, is that most people who write novels these days seem to be aware of only a fraction of its possibilities. Kundera goes on and on about this, and I never tire of reading him on the subject, because I agree very deeply with it.

Teju Cole

#99. Well, when you look at a lot of science fiction novels they're asking questions about power. There are questions about what it means to have power and what are the long-term consequences of power.

Junot Diaz

#100. Being a nerd, which is to say going to far and caring too much about a subject, is the best way to make friends I know. For me, the spark that turns an acquaintance into a friend has usually been kindled by some shared enthusiasm like detective novels or Ulysses S. Grant.

Sarah Vowell