Top 100 Quotes About Novels Books
#1. 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
#2. 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
#3. Novels arise out of the shortcoings of history.
Novalis
#4. 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
#5. 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
#6. The best of fiction, as we know, of course, doesn't tell the truth; it tales the truth.
Criss Jami
#7. Life is like a friendship, eventually it will end, by conflict or God's hand"
-Sons In The Clouds
Randy Mitchell
#8. 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
#9. 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
#10. 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
#11. Writers are a savage breed, Mr. Strike. If you want life-long friendship and selfless camaraderie, join the army and learn to kill. If you want a lifetime of temporary alliances with peers who will glory in your every failure, write novels.
Robert Galbraith
#12. I make a rod for my own back because people see my novels as quasi documentaries. But it is never history that's the main event of my books. It's my characters.
Christopher Koch
#13. I could hardly wait for following chapters, which arrived in dribs and drabs, and I began to feel for all the world like the young T.B. Macaulay walking from London to meet the Cambridge coach bearing the next installment of Waverley novels.
Vernon Sproxton
#14. Society is the stage on which manners are shown; novels are the literature. Novels are the journal or record of manners; and the new importance of these books derives from the fact, that the novelist begins to penetrate the surface, and treat this part of life more worthily.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#15. Sometimes I wonder if novel writers aren't completely f**ked in the head. ~ Drew Stirling
Jayden Hunter
#16. Neither would you, had you grown up in a library of melodramatic romance novels.
Clementine Holzinger
#17. Adult novels are as ephemeral as newspapers. Children's books stay in print for decades.
Sid Fleischman
#18. 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
#19. Some children were lucky enough to have their Potter novels banned by witch-hunting school boards and micromanaging ministers. Is there any greater job than a book you're not allowed to read, a book you could go to hell for reading?
Ann Patchett
#20. Thank God For Writing, As Now I Can Work Until My Last Breath!
Latif Mercado
#21. Various books revolutionised what I think about novels and showed me that they're not strict, formulaic things. 'Coming Through Slaughter' by Michael Ondaatje was one of them.
Sarah Hall
#22. Historical novels are, without question, the best way of teaching history, for they offer the human stories behind the events and leave the reader with a desire to know more.
Louis L'Amour
#23. Many books open with an author's assurance of order. One slipped into their waters with a silent paddle ... But novels commenced with hesitation or chaos. Readers were never fully in balance. A door a lock a weir opened and they rushed through, one hand holding a gunnel, the other a hat.
Michael Ondaatje
#24. When I was growing up, I always read horror books, while my sister read romance novels.
Dorothy Allison
#25. As you write your novel, you gradually start thinking like some of your characters in it. And at times the writer may lose himself completely in some character.
Avijeet Das
#26. 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
#27. She saw the shallow lines beaded with blood in her long mirror, and when he told her that she was beautiful, she believed him.
Astrid Knowles
#28. I want to write. I've already told my mother: That's what I want to do-write. No answer the first time. Then she asks, Write what? I say, Books, novels. [ ... ] She's against it, it's not worthy, it's not real work, it's nonsense. Later she said, A childish idea.
Marguerite Duras
#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. I saw a post the other day, where someone wrote that, when they walk through a library, they touch the spines of all the books they've read , as a way of greeting their favorite characters . . .
Try that with one of my novels, and you'll walk away counting your fingers!
Max Hawthorne
#31. 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
#32. It's beautiful here," Rees murmured, watching the light play upon the water before returning his gaze to her.
Mrs. Hollingsworth, his newest client, turned to him and forced a stiff smile. "Yes, money can buy all kinds of beautiful things," she said without a hint of emotion.
D.A. Rhine
#33. I hadn't realized quite how intense the first few years of grad school would be. When you're being assigned 40 books a week ... there's not much room for novels.
Lauren Willig
#34. With the right tools, you can write anything ...
Jeff Lyons
#35. Neither novels or their readers benefit from any attempts to divine whether any facts hide inside a story. Such efforts attack the very idea that made-up stories can matter, which is sort of the foundational assumption of our species.
John Green
#36. It's night in the Free People's World Tree Library. All the librarians are asleep, ... between the pages of their enchanted novels.
Kelly Link
#37. 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
#39. I prefer all but the very worst travel books, to all but the very best novels.
Evelyn Waugh
#40. The attraction of reading is that it allows you to live, for a few hours, as someone else - grants you access to their head, their thoughts, their secrets.
Alessandra Torre
#41. I've always been a little bit more of a novel reader than a short story reader. I think the first books that made me want to be a writer were novels.
Nell Freudenberger
#42. I grew up around books - my grandmother's house, where I lived as a small child, was full of books. My father was a history teacher, and he loved the Russian novels. There were always books around.
John Irving
#43. I've read every one of Donald Goines' books. So as soon as I heard there was an opportunity for one of his novels to be turned into a movie, I jumped at the opportunity.
DMX
#44. I'm more into graphic novels than comic books.
Ty Simpkins
#45. I describe my works as books, but my publishers in Spain, in the United States, and elsewhere insist on calling them novels.
Guillermo Cabrera Infante
#46. Romance novels are my favorite books to read. I write young adult romances, and am so happy to be promoting this wonderful genre.
Simone Elkeles
#47. 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
#49. I'd like to say I'm not dressed up for anyone in particular, but that would be a lie.
Lisa Daily
#50. What is so addictive about fiction is that it is the one reliable place in which we can apprehend and participate in - fully understand - the inward world of another person.
Rick Gekoski
#52. 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
#53. What are American dry-goods? asked the duchess, raising her large hands in wonder and accentuating the verb.
American novels, answered Lord Henry.
Oscar Wilde
#54. 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
#55. The pain of an unpublished manuscript is akin to the trauma of bearing an unborn.
Anurag Shourie
#56. But at the same time, I have trouble keeping things out of books, which is why I don't write short stories because they turn into novels.
Jonathan Coe
#57. I've read probably 25 or 30 books by Balzac, all of Tolstoy - the novels and letters - and all of Dickens. I learned my craft from these guys.
Twyla Tharp
#58. Donald Westlake's Parker novels are among the small number of books I read over and over. Forget all that crap you've been telling yourself about War and Peace and Proust-these are the books you'll want on that desert island.
Lawrence Block
#59. I have three libraries. As a gift, a friend alphabetized and organized my main library of novels, history books, and nonfiction. Then I have a photo-book collection. Then there's this nearly whole room of my childhood books. I've also got cookbooks and a big collection of horse-related books.
Sally Mann
#60. Meredith immersed herself in the novels. For some reason, fiction hit on the meaning of life so much more concisely than real life itself did.
Elin Hilderbrand
#61. I read more than I had in years-novels, short stories, three long nonfiction books about how we had stumbled into the Iraq mess (the short answer appeared to have W for a middle initial and a dick for a Vice President).
Stephen King
#62. Through his long, productive career, Paul Theroux has mixed nonfiction books about exotic travel with novels set in exotic places. Africa, Singapore, Hong Kong, Honduras - he lives in and writes about places most of us never see.
Floyd Skloot
#63. I've written 16 children's books and five unpublished novels. Some of the latter were breathtakingly bad.
Mark Haddon
#64. I'm a severe graphic novels junkie. People ask me about it, and I say I like the graphic novels. Comic books are for kids, and graphic novels are for adults. But you can't really separate the two.
Dave Pirner
#65. People often ask if my books should be read in any particular order, but they're all standalone novels, so picking up any one of them would be fine.
Jennifer McMahon
#66. Jane Austen wrote six of the most beloved novels in the English language, we are informed at the end of Becoming Jane, and so she did. The key word is beloved. Her admirers do not analyze her books so much as they just plain love them to pieces.
Roger Ebert
#67. Comic books and graphic novels are a great medium. It's incredibly underused.
Darren Aronofsky
#68. I am drawn to writing books about magic and the supernatural because those are the types of books I like to read. I've written many short stories with realistic settings, and I certainly wouldn't rule out realistic novels in the future!
Cassandra Clare
#69. I try to widen the horizons of every child I meet, and part of that is promoting diverse forms, be it graphic novels, stories told in a narrative voice, or more translated books, as well as more diverse writers and more diverse characters.
Malorie Blackman
#70. 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
#71. When I meet children at book signings, they'll bring me photos of when I first met them many years ago when they were reading my picture books, and now they're telling me how much they enjoy my novels.
Grace Lin
#72. I already read everything. I read poems and plays and novels and newspapers and comic books and magazines. I read tins in supermarkets and leaflets that come through the door, unsolicited mail. None of it lasts long and it doesn't give me answers. Reading too fast is not soothing.
Janice Galloway
#73. I've always loved writing emotionally rich, character-driven novels that explore the way people fall in love and deal with life's triumphs and tragedies. I enjoy writing the contemporary and historical books equally, though perhaps 'enjoy' is the wrong word.
Susan Wiggs
#74. And the world around me was nothing if not an infinity of distractions: cute girls, novels and comic books, my budding record collection, neighborhood boys whistling from the playground under my window, beckoning me to a soccer game.
Aleksandar Hemon
#75. The ugly fact is books are made out of books, the novel depends for its life on the novels that have been written.
Cormac McCarthy
#76. Bad books on writing tell you to "WRITE WHAT YOU KNOW", a solemn and totally false adage that is the reason there exist so many mediocre novels about English professors contemplating adultery.
Joe Haldeman
#77. The biggest difference between writing a movie and writing a novel? No one ever tries to sleep with me to get into one of my novels.
Mylo Carbia
#78. Life is'nt about getting everything you want the instant you want it.Some thing are worth waiting for.
Mira Lyn Kelly
#79. She read novels. One book after another, sometimes at the rate of one a day, for a solid year. An acceptable form of escape that didn't leave a hangover.
Wendy Wax
#80. Comic books are what novels used to be - an accessible, vernacular form with mass appeal - and if the highbrows are right, they're a form perfectly suited to our dumbed-down culture and collective attention deficit.
Charles McGrath
#81. The novel was set in an unspecified near future, because setting a novel in the present in a time of unprecedented technological and social dislocation seemed to me shortsighted ... To write a book set in the present, circa 2013, is to write about the distant past.
Gary Shteyngart
#82. If every book was judged by its cover, very few would be read; education would be limited, and fewer movies would be made.
Ellen J. Barrier
#83. They didn't have novels back then. (Tory) History says they didn't have books, yet what's this thing in my hand? It's square, bound paper that's been written on. Looks like a book to me. (Acheron) Thank you, Captain Sarcasm. How nice of you to join us again. (Tory)
Sherrilyn Kenyon
#85. In my office in Florida I have, I think, 30 manuscript piles around the room. Some are screenplays or comic books or graphic novels. Some are almost done. Some I'm rewriting. If I'm working with a co-writer, they'll usually write the first draft. And then I write subsequent drafts.
James Patterson
#86. And I know I'm supposed to feel guilty for wanting people to buy my books ... and books in general? Novels and poetry, they belong to the realm of art. How dirty of us to try to hawk art! But, after a decade of hand-wringing and apologies, I can't quite muster the guilt anymore.
Julianna Baggott
#87. The Best Deal Is The One Where Everyone Walks Away Happy!
Latif Mercado
#88. Expand the definition of 'reading' to include non-fiction, humor, graphic novels, magazines, action adventure, and, yes, even websites. It's the pleasure of reading that counts; the focus will naturally broaden. A boy won't read shark books forever.
Jon Scieszka
#89. Think of Florence, Paris, London, New York. Nobody visiting them for the first time is a stranger because he's already visited them in paintings, novels, history books and films. But if a city hasn't been used by an artist, not even the inhabitants live there imaginatively.
Alasdair Gray
#90. I think books, novels and autobiographies have a power to touch people far more personally than films do, so there's a bit more of a responsibility when you then dramatise it.
Robert Sheehan
#91. Every writer dreams about the day they can step into their fiction and wander its hallways.
Shannon L. Alder
#92. Writing fiction is the act of weaving a series of lies to arrive at a greater truth.
Khaled Hosseini
#93. When you grow up to be an author and write books, you'll think you're making the books up, but they'll all really be true, somewhere.
Diana Wynne Jones
#94. Sleep is highly overrated, Marmee; especially when there are books to be read. I shall sleep when I am dead and have enough of it.
H.L. Stephens
#95. Glad to know about all of you who care about books, including or especially poetry. I'm a much published writer/editor of 12 books (medical nonfiction, literary novels, mysteries) and much short work, inc. prize-winning pieces.
Carole Spearin McCauley
#96. I love reading all kinds of books. I usually have about ten books going at any one time - books about the past, the present, novels, non-fiction, poetry, mythology, religion, etc. Reading is my favorite thing to do.
Mary Pope Osborne
#97. Sometimes, I'm brave.
Sometimes, I'm just stubbron.
Nigia Stephens
#98. A novel and its writer are inseparable: you are your books. A play's not like that at all. 'Abandonment's not mine - it's everyone's. I wanted it to be a co-operative thing because I was tired of that anal control that I have over novels.
Kate Atkinson
#100. Novels arise out of the shortcomings of history.
Novalis
