Top 100 Quotes About Reading A Novel
#1. 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
#2. One performs a very different act when reading a movie and when reading a novel. Your attention behaves differently.
Manuel Puig
#3. 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
#4. Reading a novel was like returning to a once-beloved holiday destination.
Liane Moriarty
#5. 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
#6. 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
#7. Reading a novel of a private experience, very, very different, the nature of it is very different.
Sydney Pollack
#8. It is not mysterious to be home on a Saturday night, reading a novel in a pile of smelly golden retrievers.
E. Lockhart
#9. Reading a novel in which all characters illustrate patience, hard work, chastity, and delayed gratification could be a pretty dull experience.
Thomas Perry
#10. Maybe they'll start making serialized movies. I watched the first couple seasons of '24' and it's really fun. I bought the DVD and watched it over a month or so and it's great. It's like reading a novel. It has a lot of possibilities that are more difficult to accomplish with a film.
Jeremy Sisto
#11. To write a novel may be pure pleasure. To live a novel presents certain difficulties. As for reading a novel, I do my best to get out of it.
Karl Kraus
#12. I've found myself at one in the morning just sitting at my desk spending an hour returning emails from the day until like two in the morning. It's ridiculous, I should be sleeping, or dreaming, or reading a novel.
Brit Marling
#13. Happiness is.. reading a novel with your Bestie.
Vikrmn
#14. I think instead writers and publishers and readers need to go to the places where people are, and make the argument that there is great value to the quiet, contemplative process of reading a novel, that reading great books carefully offers pleasures and consolations that no iPad app ever can.
John Green
#15. A couple of times he called the second he'd finished reading a novel and just had to tell me about it, and I know it sounds hokey and librarianish to say so, but I just swooned when he did that.
Sarah Vowell
#16. I even feel guilty if I'm reading a novel, because I think I should be reading Homer again. I don't really know what free time is, because I don't have something to measure it against.
Simon Armitage
#17. Reading a novel, War and Peace for example, is no Catnap. Because a novel is so long, reading one is like being married forever to somebody nobody knows or cares about.
Kurt Vonnegut
#18. The experience of reading a novel and watching a television show are quite different. You can't let your audience get ahead of you, and you have to keep the energy and the pace and the drama up. They're very different things.
Michelle Fairley
#19. Oh, that sound? I'm in the hot tub, reading a novel.
Jane Smiley
#20. I think reading a novel is almost next best to having something to do.
Margaret Oliphant
#21. 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
#22. 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
#23. 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
#24. 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
#25. 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
#26. 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
#27. 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
#28. 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
#29. 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
#30. 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
#31. 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
#32. 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
#33. 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
#34. 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
#35. There are plenty of bad editors who try to impose their own vision on a book. ( ... )
A good novel editor is invisible.
Terri Windling
#36. 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
#37. 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
#39. 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
#40. 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
#41. 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
#42. 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
#43. Get your deprived, samall-town, romance-novel reading mind out of of the gutter, Becky.
Maureen A. Miller
#44. 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
#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. 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
#48. 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
#49. 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
#50. 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
#51. The counsellor who never reads a novel or never opens a book of poetry is neglecting an important resource for empathic development.
Dave Mearns
#52. The most exciting part of writing a novel is when the characters take control of the story
Brandt Legg
#53. 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
#54. Nothing was worse than reading too late and falling asleep two or three pages into a novel.
Ted Dekker
#55. 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
#56. 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
#57. 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
#58. 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
#59. 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
#60. 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
#61. 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
#62. This is not a novel to be tossed aside lightly. It should be thrown with great force.
Dorothy Parker
#63. 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
#65. 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
#66. 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
#67. You are about to begin reading Italo Calvino's new novel, If on a winter's night a traveler.
Italo Calvino
#68. 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
#69. 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
#70. 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
#71. 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
#72. Life must not be a novel that is given to us, but one that is made by us.
Novalis
#73. 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
#74. 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
#75. 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
#76. In the '40s and '50s, a lot of teachers and librarians saw the graphic novel as the enemy of reading.
Gene Luen Yang
#78. 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
#79. Reading a great novel gives the same feeling you have when you fall in love.
Luigina Sgarro
#80. 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
#81. 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
#82. No one will ever write a horror novel as scary as reading about my symptoms on WebMD.
John Raptor
#83. The reason books get banned, but movies can do almost anything is because the novel is more powerful than a movie. The reader is part of the creation of the story because they must imagine and envision it. There is creation in the act of reading.
Carolyn Mackler
#84. Reading the several thousand pages of Christopher Isherwood's complete journals is an instructive corrective to the prissiness of reading fiction. Isherwood had faults that we'd say were unforgiveable in a novel (he was careful to distance himself from these in his autobiographical fiction).
Edmund White
#85. A good novel, one which entices the author as much as it beckons the reader.
W.J. Raymond
#86. Every writer is first a member of a community of readers, and the deepest purpose of reading and writing fiction is to sustain a sense of connectedness, to resist existential loneliness; and so a novel deserves a reader's attention only as long as the author sustains the reader's trust.
Jonathan Franzen
#87. Proust is a hero of mine. I read 'A la recherche' in one go, and I'm a very slow reader. It had an astonishing impact, reading it on my own and being my main company. I think Proust is the most intelligent person to ever have written a novel.
Edward St. Aubyn
#88. She was sleeping on the bed like a novel that is yet to be read and he sat on the floor, reading her, moving his fingers through her hair and staring at her face like she was magic that none ever understood.
Akshay Vasu
#89. I have written this book quicker than any other," she notes in her diary, "[and] it is all a joke; & yet gay & quick reading I think; a writers holiday. I feel more and more sure that I will never write a novel again
Virginia Woolf
#90. A person is like a novel: Up to the very last page you don't know how it's going to end. Otherwise, there'd be no point in reading ...
Yevgeny Zamyatin
#91. Looking at someone else's relationship for the answers was like reading about a romance novel hero and expecting to find a carbon copy in real life
Maya Banks
#92. I hadn't had a chance to read an entire novel in weeks.
Whatever the others might say about politics, civil war, and hunters, the real evil was lack of reading time. If they all read more they might freak out less. And if I was going to live forever I was going to have to start a reading list.
Alyxandra Harvey
#93. A novel must be exceptionally good to live as long as the average cat.
Lord Chesterfield
#94. I didn't feel the need for anonymous affection, for people in the dark applauding. To me, it would be like writing a novel and then getting up every night and reading your novel.
Tom Lehrer
#95. My ideal state as a reader when I'm reading other people is feeling I'm vaguely wasting my time when I'm not reading that novel.
Ian McEwan
#96. My summer reading suggestion: Pick a really famous, really long novel.
Maria Semple
#97. 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
#98. A man is like a novel: until the very last page you don't know how it will end. Otherwise it wouldn't even be worth reading.
Yevgeny Zamyatin
#99. A discursive student is almost certain to fall into bad company. Ten minutes with a French novel or a German rationalist have sent a reader away with a fever for life.
Robert Aris Willmott
#100. We read five words on the first page of a really good novel and we begin to forget that we are reading printed words on a page; we begin to see images.
John Gardner
Famous Authors
Popular Topics
Scroll to Top
