Top 100 Quotes About Novels
#1. There is only one expert who is qualified to examine the souls and the life of a people and make a valuable report - the native novelist ... And when a thousand able novels have been written, there you have the soul of the people; and not anywhere else can these be had.
Mark Twain
#2. Our lover is the sun, and we the stars forever floating in their glow. We push and push, yearning for our sun's rays to reach out and touch us for just a moment in time ... one second-glance to warm our spirits and soothe our aching hearts.
Katlyn Charlesworth
#3. Angel blinked hard and bit her lip, trying to stop the quivering of her chin. "I feel like I've waited my whole life for him, waited to get to this point where I could appreciate and value him most.
Linda Winfree
#4. For me, movies and television are interesting because they are the dominant storytelling form of our time. My first love will always be fiction, and especially novels, but I'm a writer ... I write poetry and essays and criticism and I'd love to write a whole play, and sometimes I even write scripts.
Jess Walter
#5. And then the critics, going back to the novels of his maturity, found that their English had a nervous, racy vigour that eminently suited the matter.
W. Somerset Maugham
#6. All my books are made up of other books. They're all deeply structured on other fiction, because I was a student in fiction and I didn't have much actual living to draw on. I suspect a lot of other people's novels are like that, too, though they might be slower to talk about it.
Zadie Smith
#7. I started to write a series of fantasy novels when I was eleven. I have never taken anything artistic as seriously; since then, writing has felt like an attempt to get back there, to my bedroom, my maps, those races and languages and runes.
Ken Baumann
#8. I've learned to accept the fact that my students are far too busy preparing for their own legal careers to care one bit about the off-campus antics of Professor Burke. I get the impression that my students are vaguely aware of my novels, but are at best mildly curious.
Alafair Burke
#9. My wife is the most savage critic. She doesn't feel intimidated by my reputation. As far as she's concerned, she's just criticising a boyfriend who'd recently had a go at fiction. She can tell me to abandon whole novels.
Kazuo Ishiguro
#10. Of course Stephen King doesn't believe in teen novels. I've started to suspect he doesn't even believe in teenagers.
Robin Wasserman
#11. Wouldn't you like to believe you're the center of someone's universe? To feel so special that the rest of the world didn't matter and it could all wait? What would you be willing to pay for that - any time you needed to feel that way?
D.A. Rhine
#12. In writing, I'm totally anti-plans of any kind. All my attempts to plan and plot novels have come to grief, and in expensive ways.
Peter Temple
#13. She'd read in novels of people who couldn't speak because their hearts were too full and she'd always thought, Not my black heart.
But now she couldn't speak, because it was too much, whatever it was.
Loretta Chase
#14. Relationships are like a book,
It takes few seconds to burn,
But
It takes years to write,
So write it carefully
And
Never let it burn
Aditya Nighot
#15. ..love is as complex an emotion as exists. There are many reasons why love does not prosper.
.. the waters are perilous, and you would do well to know that, because unlike your novels, not every story has a happy ending.
Mary Lydon Simonsen
#16. Having read several prize-winning novels, Fancy was confident that she now knew the recipe:
1. Write a simple narrative.
2. Make a long list.
3. Scatter the contents of your list throughout your narrative.
Jaclyn Moriarty
#17. When I write a novel, I want it to be completely different from a screenplay. I'm very conscious of the difference, and I want novels to work purely as novels. Otherwise I don't see how they'll survive - why don't we just all go to the movies or watch television.
Kazuo Ishiguro
#18. I had wanted to write English crime novels based on the American hard-boiled style, and for the first two novels about Brixton, the critics didn't actually know I was Irish.
Ken Bruen
#19. The great novels have marched with the years. They are the contemporaries of time.
Ellen Glasgow
#20. I'm back, boys and girls! back from the pink padded couch palace!
Scott McCloud
#21. You won't always have the luxury of a second chance. So be careful with your first one.
Donna Kauffman
#22. Intricately plotted, beautifully paced, The Music of the Spheres is an elegant historical novel rich in detail, at times Dickensian in its description of London. Elizabeth Redfern has made an exciting debut.
Martha Grimes
#23. The man she wanted existed only in the romantic novels she was reading. She had met him. But he would never meet her.
Mary Papas
#24. It's not the having of the gift that makes the difference in life here or in another place. It's how we use that gift that shows the true heart. ~ Acronis
Madison Thorne Grey
#25. Many of my works fall into the category of 'Zeitgeist novels'. Yet I hope that they aren't only reportage, but also attempts to convey the sense of the present to the future.
Will Self
#26. Novels arise out of the shortcoings of history.
Novalis
#27. I'm an avid reader. Novels, non-fiction, comics, it doesn't matter. Best way in the world to feed your head.
Reid Scott
#28. Every one of my novels could be entitled The Unbearable Lightness of Being or The Joke or Laughable Loves; the titles are interchangeable, they reflect the small number of themes that obsess me, define me, and unfortunately, restrict me. Beyond these themes, I have nothing else to say or write.
Milan Kundera
#29. Some Prologue really makes you speechless and you started imagining the whole story and want to read it as soon as possible. One such prologue, which I read today was from "Me "N" Her.. A strange feeling by Rikky Bhartia ... "
By Himani Gupta
Rikky Bhartia
#30. When novels deal in abstractions, they generally go off the rails.
Philipp Meyer
#31. During the day she would read science fiction novels. In the evenings she watched television. And she ate, and ate, and drank, and ate.
Fay Weldon
#32. If we think of the novel and the epic ... The difference lies in the fact that the important thing about the epic is a hero
a man who is a pattern for all men. While, as Mencken pointed out, the essence of most novels lies in the breaking down of a man, in the degeneration of character.
Jorge Luis Borges
#33. I would be pleased if someone would invent a pill to remove my impatience, moodiness, and occasional bursts of anger. But if they did, I wouldn't be able to write my novels or paint.
Orhan Pamuk
#34. 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
#35. 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
#36. You are the last thought in my mind before I drift off to sleep and the first thought when I wake up each morning.
Richard Kronick
#37. I asked a French critic a couple of years ago why my books did so well in France. He said it was because in my novels people both act and think. I got a kick out of that.
Jim Harrison
#38. Historians turning their hands to fiction are all the rage. Since Alison Weir led the way in 2006, an ever-growing number of established non-fiction writers - Giles Milton, Simon Sebag Montefiore, Harry Sidebottom, Patrick Bishop, Ian Mortimer and myself included - have written historical novels.
Saul David
#39. And I used to write novels and little stories and compositions and I - but I put them away because I started acting when I was 17. So there wasn't much time.
Joan Collins
#40. 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
#41. Oh! No, I only mean what I have read about. It always puts me in mind of the country that Emily and her father travelled through, in The Mysteries of Udolpho. But you never read novels, I dare say?" "Why not?" "Because they are not clever enough for you - gentlemen read better books.
Jane Austen
#42. Film and novel characters are often stereotyped, but racial stereotyping in many novels or films creates & encourages labelling, discrimination & racism. ~Angelica Hopes
Angelica Hopes
#44. On the contrary, I think making you happy should be taken very seriously.
Drea Damara
#45. There are lots of authentic, moving characters in so-called systems novels, just as there are certainly deep structural ideas in some character-driven novels.
Dana Spiotta
#46. Even though I got a late start, first publishing an essay when I was 50 years old, I've since written eight suspense novels.
Hallie Ephron
#47. The best of fiction, as we know, of course, doesn't tell the truth; it tales the truth.
Criss Jami
#48. Many novels and modern publications are corrupters of morals or distorters of truth.
Ezra Taft Benson
#49. Contemporary novels can have a fleeting existence within the current multiplication of medias and the technological rapidity with which art is delivered and consumed. A cultural lacuna has opened, one that needs arresting.
Tom Cardamone
#51. I've always had the wish, the nostalgia to be able to write detective novels. At heart, the principal themes of detective novels are close to the things that obsess me: disappearance, the problems of identity, amnesia, the return to an enigmatic past.
Patrick Modiano
#52. 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
#53. I could go off into the wilderness and write fantasy novels for the rest of my life and probably be happy; but I always want to challenge myself.
Felicia Day
#54. I couldn't shake this feeling that I had uncovered more than something ordinary.
Nicole Gulla
#55. Life is like a friendship, eventually it will end, by conflict or God's hand"
-Sons In The Clouds
Randy Mitchell
#56. Helena had been standing by her window looking out to sea, breathing in the fresh air and admiring the picturesque scene of a small ship sailing into the harbor.
She had not been able to think of anything other than Mikolas for days.
From LONGING the 3rd chapter of TRUE LOVE
Destin Bays
#57. Part of the desire to see each other succeed is to stop putting a price on success.
Crystal Evans
#58. Me, sweep him off his feet? I know. The laws of the jungle and romance novels would have it the other way around, but I'm not going to wait one more second for that.
Laini Taylor
#59. I don't read that many novels, I'm more of a nonfiction fan.
Cory Monteith
#60. Oh, now look what you've done. You've gone and pissed him off, Breccan said as he stood behind two of the gypsies, one of his large hands clamped down on each of their shoulders.
Madison Thorne Grey
#61. The best novels capture the times in which the writer lives, which accounts for the current, if contrasting taste for lost utopias and dystopian nightmares peopled by vampires and wolves.
Chloe Thurlow
#62. Any attempt to list the ten best science fiction novels is doomed to failure.
Ann Leckie
#63. Remember babe, hurting people hurt people. And that doesn't make it right, and it won't ever make it okay. I just don't want to see you with a hurting someone that hurts people every single day.
Hope Alcocer
#64. They were inlove, but they hadn't been lovers; they were friends and yet also strangers for so many years
Nicholas Sparks
#65. I've needed someone like you for a long time. Now that I have you, no one is going to take you from me.
Logan to Madeline
Lisa Kleypas
#66. The romance genre is the only genre where readers are guaranteed novels that place the heroine at the heart of the story. These are books that celebrate women's heroic virtues and values: courage, honor, determination and a belief in the healing power of love.
Jayne Ann Krentz
#67. When I look at life I try to be as agnostic and unmetaphysical as possible. So I have to admit that, most probably, we do not have a fate. But I think that's something that draws us to novels - that the characters always have a fate. Even if it's a terrible fate, at least they have one.
Daniel Kehlmann
#68. Katie leaned forward conspiratorially. Oh, sweetie, I just said that because Alice is an old bag. You go after Devon. The man is fine. I don't blame you for changing your look for a shot at that. When the pool about you two gets going at Petie's Pub, I'm putting my money on you.
Susan Meier
#70. In my view, the plangent artificiality of a lot of creative work results from the fact that the people who write novels, direct films and put on plays tend to read too many novels, watch too many films and go to too many plays.
Will Self
#71. 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
#72. 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
#73. I've written a lot of novels for teens and tweens ... but I'd never really tackled the North Carolina side of me. And it's so strong and so important, and yet I hadn't acknowledged it. And so one of the things I wanted to do in "Shine" is take that on.
Lauren Myracle
#74. Are you sorry? Do you wish you could do it all again and go off and write novels instead of being a teacher?
No. You can't trade what is for what might have been.
Lurlene McDaniel
#75. I was where my heart held out hope that someday I would be again. It was the reason I never forgot him. My heart had held onto him. And as he clung to me, as he soothed me, held me, I felt everything begin to relax.
Rebecca Ethington
#76. If the shining sun blinds the eye,it makes sense. But to be blinded by gold and silver!
I.R. Shankar
#77. I do my best to build a strong factual foundation for each of my novels and rely upon my author's notes to keep my conscience clear.
Sharon Kay Penman
#78. I didn't know anything about Opus Die except from pop culture, like Dan Brown novels, which I knew wasn't really knowing anything about Opus Die.
Wes Bentley
#79. 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
#80. I love it when novels contain a broad cast of characters, including queer ones.
Emma Donoghue
#81. After closely examining my conscience, I venture to state that in my historical novels I intended the content to be just as modern and up-to-date as in the contemporary ones.
Lion Feuchtwanger
#82. Philosophers have argued without a trend toward order; time would lack meaning. The future would be indistinguishable from the past. Sequences of events would be just so many random scenes from a thousand novels. History would be indistinct, like the mist slowly gathered by treetops in evening.
Alan Lightman
#83. Architecture is a discipline that takes time and patience. If one spends enough years writing complex novels one might be able, someday, to construct a respectable haiku.
Thom Mayne
#84. You mean you don't fit characters into a plot? excatly ...
John Geddes
#85. One should not chug an entire glass of wine at an elegant dinner party. I start hacking and coughing, having practically water-boarded myself out of sheer humiliation.
Lisa Daily
#86. Muse, time has taught me that all metaphysical systems, even historical facts given as truths, are hardly that, so I amuse myself with more agreeable lies; I no longer read anything but novels.
Mary Wortley Montagu
#87. When I was in my early 20s, my dream was to write mystery novels. I wanted to do what my favourite crime writer, Ross Macdonald, did - crank out a book a year. The only problem - and it was a considerable one - was that I stank.
Linwood Barclay
#88. (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
#89. Another thing I learned is that novels, even those from apparently distant times and places, remain current and enlightening, and also comforting.
Jane Smiley
#90. When I write a book I'm always questioning the project as a whole. I always feel I might have to just throw it away and forget about it, and I've done that with novels I've started and worked on for a long time. It's an option I need in order to write freely.
Daniel Kehlmann
#91. I am Superwoman. I am the author of 15 novels, including one about cancer. I am not, however, someone who 'gets' cancer. I am a sun worshipper who never thought it could happen to me.
Jane Green
#92. He said he wants variety. The irony is that I wanted variety too. But I wanted variety in a solid, stable committed relationship where I would wake up each morning asking "What are we going to do today?" not asking "Who are you going to do today?
Aimee Lane
#93. For me, writing post-apocalyptic novels isn't so much about exploding helicopters and fifty-megaton doomsday bombs as it is about the pleasure of dealing with the best of everything that makes us human: cleverness, grit, loyalty, and self-sacrifice.
Jeff Carlson
#94. 10% of authors earn 75% of the royalties. If you're writing a Romance novel, your odds will be slightly higher at making back your investment. Throw in a few vampires, even better.
J.R. Young
#95. One did not drink sherry before the evening, just as one did not read a novel in the morning.
Barbara Pym
#96. I have always loved to read, and now that I have penned 10 novels and a few magazine articles, I have fallen seriously in love with writing stories and seeing them go out into the world. It's magical, you know?
Dorothea Benton Frank
#97. Because sometimes in life, Ken didn't always choose Barbie. (Jane Alcott)
Rachel Gibson
#98. Spy novels are traditionally about lone wolves, but how many people actually live like that?
Alan Furst
#99. The rule for finding plots for character-centered novels, which is to ask: 'So what's the worst possible thing I can do to *this* guy?' And then do it.
Lois McMaster Bujold
#100. I feel like it's hard to get into historical novels where you know what the story is far too well.
Matthew Tobin Anderson
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