Quotes About Reading Novels

#1. People are so used to reading novels now, they just read a poem straight through to get the meaning. And that's something totally different from the slow way you read something if it's a tune; which to me a poem has to be.

Alice Oswald

#2. I have to say that movies have as much impact on me as music. And that I learned as much about narrative from movies as I did from reading novels, how to arrange stories, how to juxtapose things.

Dana Spiotta

#3. People lose it when I say this, but I'm a novelist who doesn't read novels. There are lots of good reasons for not reading novels! I'm also a game writer who doesn't play games - I keep everything very separate. The only crossover with me is comics. I write them, and I read them passionately.

Karen Traviss

#4. Reading novels needs almost as much talent as writing them.

Anthony Powell

#5. He didn't much like reading novels - he preferred history or philosophy - or poetry, although he could read only a little poetry at a time, because when a poem "spoke to him" it was as if a brilliant, agonizing light had been turned upon some tiny, private cell of his soul.

Claire Messud

#6. I have learned as much about writing about my people by listening to blues and jazz and spirituals as I have by reading novels.

Ernest Gaines

#7. I can imagine no greater bliss than to lie about, reading novels all day.

Julia Quinn

#8. I like reading novels because it provides insight into human behavior. I am really interested in feelings and think they are what define us as a species. When you really get it right in acting, it's an act of empathy. You feel less distant from others, and that is really exciting.

Claire Danes

#9. It's because of the way you are. It's why you're happy reading novels. You're only comfortable with a piece of the world that you can hold in your hand.

Lan Samantha Chang

#10. Most of humanity gets by without reading novels or poetry, and no one would deny the richness of their thoughts.

Ian McEwan

#11. You really love to gossip, don't you?" he asked, wishing she had brought him a glass of wine.
"Yes, I suppose I do," she answered, sounding surprised at the realization. "You think that's why I love reading novels so much?

Donna Leon

#12. Instead of sniping at her like Mrs. Mi, Mrs. Ting let my mother do all sorts of things she wanted, like reading novels: before, reading a book without a Marxist cover would bring down a rain of criticism about being a bourgeois intellectual.

Jung Chang

#13. Some people find that reading novels is very therapeutic precisely because it does allow one to view reality from an entirely different perspective.

Amanda Quick

#14. I was one of those kids who was always seeking the truth, and I first looked for truth by reading novels. It took quite a long time for me to realize there are better ways.

Cynthia Kenyon

#15. I used to go with my parents and loved it, I was in school plays, and I started reading plays before I started reading novels. I'll defend it to the hilt. When theatre is good it is fabulous.

Patrick Marber

#16. Miss Aubrey, come and have pity on us. We are reading novels and feel our manliness diminishing by the moment. Come restore our vanity, do, and tell us we look the dashing officers we once were.

Julie Klassen

#17. To keep an active mind, I find that reading novels is really good.

Alison Pill

#18. The slight sense of degeneracy induced by reading novels before luncheon

Elizabeth Bowen

#19. 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

#20. 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

#21. Certainly, as a reader, I had always discovered the deepest truths in fiction; it was through reading novels that I learned about the world, a world not only of fact but of imagination and emotion.

Alice Hoffman

#22. I can't be reading novels when I'm writing a novel, because somebody's voice creeps in. The hardest thing to do is keep the tone and your attitude over the course of a year or however long it takes.But when I'm writing short stories, which I will be doing shortly, I can read anything I like.

T.C. Boyle

#23. I love reading novels, and I love going to movies, but I kind of hate going to an adaptation of a novel, and it starts off with a voiceover.

David Benioff

#24. I get a lot of moral guidance from reading novels, so I guess I expect my novels to offer some moral guidance, but they're not blueprints for action, ever.

Ursula K. Le Guin

#25. 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

#26. 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

#27. The best of fiction, as we know, of course, doesn't tell the truth; it tales the truth.

Criss Jami

#28. A bank book makes good reading - better than some novels.

Sir Harry Lauder

#29. I entered a poem in a poetry contest around 1987, and the poem won and I received $1,000 for it. That made me realize that maybe what I was writing was worth reading to people. After that, for some reason, I turned to novels and I've written mainly novels ever since.

Sharon Creech

#30. 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

#31. 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

#32. Sometimes I wonder if novel writers aren't completely f**ked in the head. ~ Drew Stirling

Jayden Hunter

#33. Neither would you, had you grown up in a library of melodramatic romance novels.

Clementine Holzinger

#34. I do believe that characters in novels belong to their writers and their readers pretty equally. I've learned a lot of things about the characters I write from people who read about them. Readers expand them in ways I don't think of and take them to places I can't go.

Ann Brashares

#35. 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

#36. 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

#37. 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

#38. I love graphic novels - I love reading them, I enjoyed writing them, I would love to go back and do them again. I hope I'm savvy enough to do them in the right way.

John Ridley

#39. I think people who share my dreams can enjoy reading my novels. And that's a wonderful thing. I said that myths are like a reservoir of stories, and if I can act as a similar kind of "reservoir," albeit a modest one, that would make me very happy.

Haruki Murakami

#40. [Harry] had always suffered from a vague restlessness, a longing for adventure that she told herself severely was the result of reading too many novels when she was a small child.

Robin McKinley

#41. It's true, reading too many novels makes you go blind.

David Mitchell

#42. Poetry, plays, novels, music, they are the cry of the human spirit trying to understand itself and make sense of our world.

L.M. Elliott

#43. Maybe she should stop reading those damn romance novels. They were giving her crazy expectations.

Lexi Blake

#44. I read a lot of history, biographies, science, and novels,' he says, ushering a reporter out the door with a hint of relief. 'I do not read management or economics.'
(from an interview in the Christian Science Monitor, July 26, 1993)

Peter F. Drucker

#45. She had an exciting job, several good friends, her cat, her peanut M&Ms, the mystery novels she was forever reading, and - well, me.

Tom Savage

#46. It is practically an axiom in psychiatry that precocious intellect combined with physical weakness can give rise to many unpleasant character traits - avarice, delusions of grandeur , and obsessive masturbation, to name just a few.

Sam Savage

#47. 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

#48. Low and behold what comes of reading too many romance novels.

Kellyn Roth

#49. 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

#50. As far as benefits to reading historical novels, there are several! For one thing, you learn about life in another era. Secondly, these novels help us to develop a deeper understanding of the legacy of women who came before us and the strides made by our ancestors.

Mary Pope Osborne

#51. Why did people ask "What is it about?" as if a novel had to be about only one thing.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

#52. 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

#53. 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

#54. My mom wasn't, like, she was reading all these historical romance novels the majority of the time. She read a feminist book and then my dad would sit down and explain it to her like she was an idiot.

Kathleen Hanna

#55. Steve Yarbrough is a writer of many gifts, but what makes Safe from the Neighbors such a magnificent achievement is its moral complexity ... Safe from the Neighbors does what only the best novels can do; after reading it, we can never see the world, or ourselves, in quite the same way.

Ron Rash

#56. 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

#57. I wondered what he would have thought if he'd known that I'd gleaned most of my information from reading historical romance novels.

Nicole Luiken

#58. The rustic, the reader of novels, the pure ascetic: these three are truly happy men

Fernando Pessoa

#59. 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

#60. I always read a lot as a kid and I'd spend long periods of time in my room reading ... I wasn't reading anything great until I got older, but I used to read Agatha Christie mysteries and all of Ian Fleming's 'James Bond' novels.

Michael Riedel

#61. 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

#62. I grew up reading the classic novels of Cold War espionage, and I studied Russian history and Soviet foreign policy.

Daniel Silva

#63. 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

#64. 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

#65. All the old school Young Adult novels inspired me. I grew up reading R.L. Stine, Christopher Pike, Richie Cusick, and so on. I loved how you never really knew who the 'bad guys' were in their works, and I wanted to capture that feeling with 'Don't Look Back.'

Jennifer Armentrout

#66. 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

#67. 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

#68. Reading was like a drug, a dope. The novels created moods in which I lived for days.

Richard Wright

#69. I think reading the novels definitely was a good source for me to study from.

Laura Vandervoort

#70. My dream was to eventually make movies. To be part of the fairy tales, stories and novels I loved reading so much growing up.

Irena A. Hoffman

#71. Writing novels worth reading will bugger up your mind, jeopardize your relationships, and distend your life.

David Mitchell

#72. Novels aren't just happy escapes; they are slivers of people's souls, nailed to the pages, dripping ink from veins of wood pulp. Reading the right one at the right time can make all the difference.

Brandon Sanderson

#73. 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

#74. I started out in life as a poet; I was only writing poetry all through my 20s. It wasn't until I was about 30 that I got serious about writing prose. While I was writing poems, I would often divert myself by reading detective novels; I liked them.

Paul Auster

#75. She'd obviously read the book many times before, and so she read flawlessly and confidently, and I could hear her smile in the reading of it, and the sound of that smile made me think that maybe I would like novels better if Alaska Young read them to me.

John Green

#76. Yes, I was good at reading people. I studied them so I could put them in my novels.

Jennifer Echols

#77. You should spend more time reading the Good Book and less reading all those novels. What are you going to tell the Lord on Judgement Day when He asks you why you didn't read your bible? Hmm?
I will tell Him that His press agents could have done with a writing lesson or two, I said. To myself.

Jennifer Donnelly

#78. 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

#79. 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

#80. A world where falling in love requires marrying is a world where novels require reading from beginning to end.

Soseki Natsume

#81. Reading sparks writing.

A.D. Posey

#82. Novels arise out of the shortcomings of history.

Novalis

#83. READING, n. The general body of what one reads. In our country it consists, as a rule, of Indiana novels, short stories in "dialect" and humor in slang.

Ambrose Bierce

#84. This is what I love about novels, both reading them and writing them. They jump into the abyss, to be with you

John Green

#85. Some people claim that it is okay to read trashy novels because sometimes you can find something valuable in them. You can also find a crust of bread in a garbage can, if you search long enough, but there is a better way.

Jim Rohn

#86. The secret of keeping young is to read children's books. You read the books they write for little children and you'll keep young. You read novels, philosophy, stuff like that and it makes you feel old.

John Cheever

#87. I believe reading books is one of the best ways to gain real empathy for people different from ourselves, and helping boys develop empathy for girls is a cause worth fighting for.

Shannon Hale

#88. Life must not be a novel that is given to us, but one that is made by us.

Novalis

#89. 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

#90. I love reading and writing novels that don't fit nicely into a specific genre. But they also have to move. I want to be excited about each chapter, because otherwise why is it there?

Patrick Keithahn

#91. No one knows what they are anymore," he says. "If you're not in the habit of reading nineteenth-century novels, you think that the author has killed a fruit fly directly above a comma - semicolons have become nothing but a distraction.

John Irving

#92. I grew up reading not-serious literature, like comic books and pulp novels, so my instinct is to amuse the reader and entertain.

Kevin Wilson

#93. What I'm suggesting then is that much of our response to novels may have to do with the kind of "system" or "conversation" we grew up in and within which we had to find a position and establish an identity.

Tim Parks

#94. You'll want to read books - novels, because ladies are frivolous; poetry because ladies are sentimental; and sermons, because we are pious. If you must read essays, Mr. Emerson might be best. Your gentleman may have a nodding acquaintance with his works.

Donald McCaig

#95. Some people become passionate readers and fans of science fiction during childhood or adolescence. I picked up on SF somewhat later than that; my escape reading of choice during my youth was historical novels, and one of my favorite writers was Mary Renault.

Pamela Sargent

#96. The truth is that every true admirer of the novels cherishes the happy thought that he alone - reading between the lines - has bcome the secret friend of their author.

Katherine Mansfield

#97. 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

#98. At Oxford University, I studied languages so I could read the great novels as they were originally written. I took what in the United States would be a double major in Russian and French, but I have to admit that the pressure of getting through so many books spoiled reading for me.

Kate Beckinsale

#99. The progress of the friendship between Catherine and Isabella was quick as its beginning had been warm ... and if a rainy morning deprived them of other enjoyments, they were still resolute in meeting in defiance of wet and dirt, and shut themselves up, to read novels together.

Jane Austen

#100. The whole world's writing novels, but nobody's reading them.

Robert Galbraith