Top 100 Quotes About The Novel
#1. The novel 'World War Z' is told from the perspectives of so many people - speaking to the narrator - that there's no way a movie could capture all of them. Still, the idea of turning a zombie pandemic into a war story is fascinating and could have translated easily to film.
Annalee Newitz
#2. Writing the novel felt so private to me! I think publishing a novel is quite public and exposing, and what's a little frightening to me right now is the fact that it feels so entirely opposed to the privacy that is writing.
Garth Greenwell
#3. I thought I could rely on the plot in the novel and fill in the colour between the lines, but I made a mistake with that assumption. It was really, really hard because you pull a few things apart and then you realise how everything relies on everything else and it can all fall apart.
Ben Affleck
#4. I had always said to myself that forty was the cut off point of my apprenticeship which may for some people sound like a very long one, but the novel as art is a middle-aged art.
Jane Rule
#5. The novel puts an ad in the personals:
Serial monogamist seeks same.
6x9, 220 pages. Hobbies: candlelit
tension, tasteful gore. Weakness:
occasional flashbacks. Enjoys long
walks on the beach to search for
bodies washing up on shore.
Erin Murphy
#6. to an infinite artist, a Creator in love with His craft, there is no unimportant corner, there is no thrown-away image, no tattered thread in the novel left untied.
N.D. Wilson
#7. By the 1950s The Novel had become a nationwide tournament. There was a magical assumption that the end of World War II in 1945 was the dawn of a new golden age of the American Novel, like the Hemingway-Dos Passos-Fitzgerald era after World War I.
Tom Wolfe
#8. It's a rare reader who doesn't go to the novel looking for a kind of encouragement to live.
Norman Rush
#9. Characters make their own plot. The dimensions of the characters determine the action of the novel.
Harper Lee
#10. Adolescence is like a heavy rain. Even though you catch a cold from it, you still look forward to experiencing it once again.
(From 'In Those Bygone Years, The Girl We All Went After' the novel)
Giddens Ko
#11. I wasn't aware I'd write the novel when I wrote the New Yorker story either. And the narration of their construction in 10:04 is fiction, however flickering.
Ben Lerner
#12. The novelist teaches the reader to comprehend the world as a question. There is wisdom and tolerance in that attitude. In a world built on sacrosanct certainties the novel is dead.
Milan Kundera
#13. The master of ceremonies asked people to say what they thought the function of the novel might be in modern society, and one critic said, "To provide touches of color in rooms with all-white walls." Another one said, "To describe blow-jobs artistically.
Kurt Vonnegut
#14. I do write long, long character notes - family background, history, details of appearance - much more than will ever appear in the novel. I think this is what lifts a book from that early calculated, artificial stage.
Anne Tyler
#15. For a Jewish Puritan of the middle class, the novel is serious, the novel is work, the novel is conscientious application why, the novel is practically the retail business all over again.
Howard Nemerov
#16. Somehow, you can achieve a directness in the novel that you can't get anywhere else.
Chad Harbach
#17. Real literature was about psychological, emotional, and social truth as demonstrated by the actions and reflections of its protagonists; the novel was about character developed over time.
Julian Barnes
#18. The novel can't compete with cars, the movies, television, and liquor. A guy who's had a good feed and tanked up on good wine gives his old lady a kiss after supper and his day is over. Finished.
Louis-Ferdinand Celine
#19. And so there was a fundamental scepticism about the ability of any institution, even one like the novel, to tell us anything true.
Garth Risk Hallberg
#20. The novel is, above all, an intense experience of prolonged intimacy with another consciousness.
Jane Smiley
#21. I think the novel form chose me. I was a writer before I became a criminal ... my first instinct was to write.
Gregory David Roberts
#22. The novel is very much alive, indeed. In Toronto at the Sixth Annual International Festival of Authors (October 1985) I listened to novelists by the dozen.
William Golding
#23. When 'Midnight's Children' came out, people in the West tended to respond to the fantasy elements in the novel, to praise it in those terms. In India, people read it like a history book.
Salman Rushdie
#24. The novel form is about the protagonist's struggle to transform his arbitrary, fragmented, given experience into a narrative as meaningful as his favorite books.
Elif Batuman
#25. Of course we all know that's not how life works. The novel that is our life can end at any time. Sometimes even on page one.
Junot Diaz
#26. The novel is just fine: It's novelists who aren't doing so well.
Russell Smith
#27. The critic lives at second hand. He writes about. The poem, the novel, or the play must be given to him; criticism exists by the grace of other men's genius.
George Steiner
#28. I find in most novels no imagination at all. They seem to think the highest form of the novel is to write about marriage, because that's the most important thing there is for middle-class people.
Gore Vidal
#29. The novel, as a genre, was once considered a diversion every bit as frivolous as Facebook, but over the years, we've managed to convince ourselves that reading fiction is as important to our mental digestion as fresh fruits and vegetables are to the processes that take place a little further down.
Lynn Coady
#30. Adventure, the first great theme of the novel.
Milan Kundera
#31. I can imagine her memories of the novel, or, more likely, of who she was and how she felt when reading it.
Rabih Alameddine
#32. The novel is a more diffused form and more suited to those who like to linger along the way; it also requires a more massive energy.
Flannery O'Connor
#33. I never know when I finish the novel I am writing which will be the next novel out of the station.
John Irving
#34. The novel is a highly corrupt medium, after all - in the end the vast majority of them simply aren't that great, and are destined to be forgotten.
Lev Grossman
#35. The DNA of the novel - which, if I begin to write nonfiction, I will write about this - is that: the title of the novel is the whole novel. The first line of the novel is the whole novel. The point of view is the whole novel. Every subplot is the whole novel. The verb tense is the whole novel.
Mary Kay Zuravleff
#36. Always in the short story there is this sense of outlawed figures wandering about the fringes of society ... As a result there is in the short story at its most characteristic something we do not often find in the novel
an intense awareness of human loneliness.
Frank O'Connor
#37. Every once in a while I feel the tremendous force of the novel. But it does not stay with me.
Zane Grey
#38. I've had some tremendous adventures, good and bad. It's part of the novel, and a novel isn't interesting if it doesn't have some good and bad. And you don't know what good is if bad hasn't been a part of your life.
Lynn Johnston
#39. Together with this outrage we may take the mutilation of the novel called The Search at the exact point where the author upholds, or appears for the moment to uphold, the doctrine that loyalty to the abstract truth must override all personal considerations;
Dorothy L. Sayers
#40. Perhaps nothing escapes this fate but the liveliness and nimbleness of the mind - the very qualities with which the novel is written, qualities that belong to a universe other than the one we live in.
Italo Calvino
#41. The responsibility for change ... lies within us. We must begin with ourselves, teaching ourselves not to close our minds prematurely to the novel, the surprising, the seemingly radical.
Alvin Toffler
#42. The essay form has superceded the novel as the vehicle that best suggests the prevailing apocalyptic gestalt, and as the talisman that is most able to repel the onset of paralysing dread.
Adam Parfrey
#43. I was fortunate that Yale has a very open and creative law school. I took many courses outside the law school, and every semester, the students had a literature reading group. I was asked to lead one on 'Dante and the Concept of Justice,' and it was around that time that I began writing the novel.
Matthew Pearl
#44. Most good novelists have been women or homosexuals. The novel is the triumphant evolved creation, one increasingly has to think, of these two groups, who have cooperated more closely in this domain than in any other.
Nicholson Baker
#46. Imagination, which is the Eldorado of the poet and of the novel-writer, often proves the most pernicious gift to the individuals who compose the talkers instead of the writers in society.
Marguerite Gardiner, Countess Of Blessington
#47. For me the novel is a social vehicle, it reflects society.
Margaret Atwood
#48. I'd read a book called A Reliable Wife not too long before leaving on the world's strangest trip, and as I climbed into bed, a line from the novel crossed my mind: 'He had lost the habit of romance.
Stephen King
#49. It might be more useful, if not necessarily more true, to think of photography as a narrow, deep area between the novel and film.
Lewis Baltz
#50. I began to write fiction on the assumption that the true enemies of the novel were plot, character, setting and theme, and having once abandoned these familiar ways of thinking about fiction, totality of vision or structure was really all that remained.
John Hawkes
#51. From the freedom to explore comes the joy of learning. From knowledge acquired by personal initiative arises the desire for more knowledge. And from mastery of the novel and beautiful world awaiting every child comes self-confidence.
E. O. Wilson
#52. We're talking about the novel, right? But maybe we're not. We're talking about ourselves. And I guess that's what can start to happen when you talk about a book.
Meg Wolitzer
#53. The short story, free from the longuers of the novel is also exempt from the novel's conclusiveness
too often forced and false: it may thus more nearly than the novel approach aesthetic and moral truth.
Edith Wharton
#54. The novel ceases to be looked at as a novel. Such is the overwhelming power of motion pictures. Gore Vidal pointed out that the movies are the only thing anybody's really interested in. The association with movies and movie money can, and certainly did in my case, occlude a novel as a novel.
William Monahan
#55. I love the novel because it's like a love affair. You can just fall into it and keep going, and you never know where it's going to take you.
Daniel Alarcon
#56. The novel, I submit, is not merely the ultimate goal. It is also the place to start.
Lawrence Block
#57. There is something of the ghoul in the page-swallower and of the novel-reader in the stroller through cemeteries.
Regis Debray
#58. I have said that each aspect of the novel demands a different quality of the reader. Well, the prophetic aspect demands two qualities: humility and the suspension of the sense of humour.
E. M. Forster
#59. I usually submit a novel at a certain number of words, and when I've finished working with my editor, the novel is longer than when I submitted it. I need my editor to help me open up the story.
David Bergen
#60. There comes a point when you're writing a novel when you're in it so deep that the life of the novel becomes more real to you than life itself. You have to write your way out of it; once you're there, it's too late to abandon.
Hanya Yanagihara
#61. You're never confident. You go in fear and trembling every day. It would be awfully nice to think that you know how to write a novel. But what you know is the novel you just wrote. You don't have the slightest notion how to write the one you're going to do next.
Wallace Stegner
#62. Novels include padding; I think padding may be an essential part of the novel, for all I know.
Jorge Luis Borges
#63. The novel, for me, was an accident. I really don't consider myself a novelist.
Wole Soyinka
#64. People think that because a novel's invented, it isn't true. Exactly the reverse is the case. Biography and memoirs can never be wholly true, since they cannot include every conceivable circumstance of what happened. The novel can do that.
Anthony Powell
#65. I grew up in a working-class Catholic family in south Louisiana. I went to a state university. I taught literature, wrote a novel that was the novel I wanted to write, and got a couple of good reviews but no real traction. I had no idea how to get a job in TV.
Nic Pizzolatto
#66. It is wrong to chide the novel for being fascinated by mysterious coincidences ... but it is right to chide man for being blind to such coincidences in his daily life. For he thereby deprives his life a dimension of beauty.
Milan Kundera
#67. While the novel-writer aims at an eminently natural method of transcription, the author of the short story adopts a very artificial one
Henry Seidel Canby
#68. Richard Barager has written THE novel of the Sixties - a passion-filled, pitch-perfect, roller coaster of a tale about the decade that divides us all.
David Horowitz
#69. The novel as we knew it in the nineteenth century was killed off by Proust and Joyce.
Alberto Moravia
#70. Author, Family Tree The Novel quote- "Total understanding, is sharing the same feeling.
Andrea N. Carr
#71. Another reason I think the novel will survive is that the reader has to work in a novel. In a film, you are presented with someone else's imagination exactly bodied out. The marvelous thing about a novel is that every reader will imagine even the very simplest sentence slightly differently.
John Fowles
#72. The novel is about five students of classics who are studying with a classics professor, and they take the ideas of the things that they're learning from him a bit too seriously, with terrible consequences.
Donna Tartt
#73. Had I not gone to Japan in 1986, had I stayed home and majored in English literature as I'd intended to do, I might indeed have become an investment banker, an outcome that perhaps would have proved a more severe blow to the health of the U.S. economy than to the history of the novel.
John Burnham Schwartz
#74. I'm never interested in writing a kind of neutral, universal novel that could be set anywhere. To me, the novel is a local thing.
Zadie Smith
#75. 'The Chimney Sweeper's Boy' began differently from any previous book I'd written. It actually derives from a story a friend - the novel's dedicatee, Patrick Maher - told me.
Ruth Rendell
#76. She is a bold and passionate woman, fighting to earn respect as a farm owner and over the course of the novel she has to endure much suffering, which enhances her better qualities while diminishing some elements of her less admirable traits.
Thomas Hardy
#77. (The short story) is a form that has all the power of the novel - some would say more - but none of the self-importance.
Joseph O'Connor
#78. By its very nature, the novel indicates that we are becoming. There is no final solution. There is no last word.
Carlos Fuentes
#79. So long as you tell a story that falls within the fairly generous boundaries of the suspense novel, you're free to make the novel as good as you can. You're allowed to challenge the reader. You can experiment with voice and style.
Rodman Philbrick
#80. The novel is a prose narrative of some length that has something wrong with it.
Randall Jarrell
#81. The atmosphere of orthodoxy is always damaging to prose, and above all it is completely ruinous to the novel, the most anarchical of all forms of literature.
George Orwell
#82. 'One Hundred Years of Solitude' convinced me to drop out of Harvard graduate school. The novel reminded me of everything my Ph.D. program was trying to make me forget. Thank you, Gabriel Garcia Marquez.
Francine Prose
#83. A reviewer's lot is not always an easy one. I can remember flogging myself to finish Harold Brodkey's 'The Runaway Soul' despite the novel's consummate, unmitigated tedium.
Michael Dirda
#84. I belong to the middle class that grew up very influenced by the Catholic church. The people of the novel are from a more pagan and practical world in which the Christianity is just a veneer.
John McGahern
#85. If you die without agency as a child, but you have agency in your body [in the novel], how is it to be enacted unless it is being reimagined by a writer?
Fred D'Aguiar
#86. The writer has to take risks and go somewhere full of mystery and possibility for the novel to deepen over the years it takes to write it.
Dana Spiotta
#87. What I want is to respond to the challenge posed by the mass media - to permit the novel to say what can only be said by narrative - to allow it to be itself.
Carlos Fuentes
#88. The novel, arguably the author's best, had a disquieting power, like a sleeping crocodile.
Roberto Bolano
#89. Like a Chinese box, the world of the novel contained smaller worlds, and inside those were yet smaller worlds. Together, these worlds made up a single universe, and the universe waited there in the book to be discovered by the reader.
Haruki Murakami
#90. The novel is too capacious, inclusive, unruly, and personal for perfection. Too long, sometimes too much like life.
Ian McEwan
#91. The novel wins by points, the short story by knockout.
Julio Cortazar
#92. Believe me, when I say;
There are no two powers
That command the soul.
One is God
The other is the tide.
-Anon
From the novel Abarat
Clive Barker
#93. The novel doesn't come into existence until certain methods of reproducing fiction come along.
Leslie Fiedler
#94. Yes, there's a relaying of internal states that only a novel can achieve. In my view, the novel is one of Europe's greatest gifts to the world. America and Africa collaborated to give the world jazz. We'll call it even.
Teju Cole
#95. I have often heard that the novel is dead. But I see novels produced, I don't know how many a week, in France. I have the impression it's carrying along quite well.
Nathalie Sarraute
#96. Look at it this way: if you write the novel of 'Cold Mountain,' it costs exactly the same to produce and market as a novel set in a room. If you make the film, the disparity of costs is huge.
Anthony Minghella
#97. The novel is a hybrid genre and a large part of its charm arises from the alluvial nature of its materials. There is nothing that doesn't suit a novelist in action, when he's in the course of writing his novel.
Enrique Vila-Matas
#98. If I had a plot that was all set in advance, why would I want go through the agony of writing the novel? A novel is a kind of exploration and discovery, for me at any rate.
Chaim Potok
#99. Your characters are always your children. And while you are writing, you're keeping them safe. Now they're ready to go into the world and it's sad. I'm happy with the way the novel came out but all the characters' ending really saddened me.
Yiyun Li
#100. What the novel portrays is basically the reality of Vienna today: one of the world's great cities robbed of its lifeblood, reduced to a bland provincial capital filled with beautiful old buildings.
Tom Reiss
