Read Novel Quotes

#1. To me, a recently read novel was like a miniature planet: only a few hours earlier I had been breathing its air and living contentedly among its people - and now I was expected to pronounce a judgement about its worth?

Julie Schumacher

#2. I never get used to it, the unknowable mystery of a person so suddenly, totally closed, snapped shut like a half-read novel.

Linda Barnes

#3. He wanted to know about day-to-day life in America, what people ate and what consumed them, what shamed them and what attracted them, but he read novel after novel and was disappointed:

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

#4. I'm good with a grill. I like to make cheeseburgers - I once read in a David Goodis crime novel that you're only supposed to flip a burger once.

Noah Baumbach

#5. Every once in awhile you find a novel so magical that there is no escaping its spell. The Night Circus is one of these rarities - engrossing, beautifully written and utterly enchanting. If you choose to read just one novel this year, this is it

Danielle Trussoni

#6. John Green has written a powerful novel - one that plunges headlong into the labyrinth of life, love, and the mysteries of being human. This is a book that will touch your life, so don't read it sitting down. Stand up, and take a step into the Great Perhaps.

KL Going

#7. I was a total nerd growing up. I'd rather sit home and read a novel on New Year's Eve and say, 'Wow, I read the whole thing in one night!' That was my idea of a big time.

Beth Broderick

#8. 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

#9. 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

#10. Christy Barritt's novel, Hazardous Duty, is a delightful read from beginning to end. The story's fresh, engaging heroine with an unusual occupation hooked me, and I couldn't put it down. I highly recommend Hazardous Duty.

Colleen Coble

#11. I'm beginning to read Italo Calvino's new novel!

Italo Calvino

#12. I've never read a young adult novel, though. I'm sure I would love it, but I've never read one.

Elizabeth Olsen

#13. I rarely read newspapers. There's more truth in a decent novel.

T.R. Richmond

#14. To read Hotel Angeline is to celebrate how this diverse group of writers (and readers, all of them) can pool their talents and expertise to come up with such an entertaining and soul-satisfying novel.

Nancy Pearl

#15. I've read science fiction my whole life. I never really dreamed that I'd be a published science fiction writer myself, but a short story I started years ago sort of demanded to be turned into a novel.

Ramez Naam

#16. My springboard is always the script. Even if the script is taken from a novel, I often haven't read the novel ...

John Hurt

#17. The bookseller read Catherine like a novel. She let him leaf through her and look through her story.

Nina George

#18. 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

#19. All my life I have been trying to learn, to read, to see and hear, and to write. At sixty-five I began my first novel and after the five years, lacking a month, I took to finish it, I was still traveling, still a seeker.

Carl Sandburg

#20. I'd never read a romance novel about conjoined twins. It was a huge market that had never been tapped. I had just come up with the new Twilight,

Robyn Peterman

#21. I've read short stories that are as dense as a 19th century novel and novels that really are short stories filled with a lot of helium.

Lynn Abbey

#22. When we look at a painting, listen to a piece of music, read a novel, or watch a movie we are taking in the artist's composition. The composition is the totality of the work.

Mike Svob

#23. I read the final Wallander novel, 'The Troubled Man,' not long after it was published.

Kenneth Branagh

#24. I read a lot. I am an inveterate reader. I always have a novel going.

Tom Sizemore

#25. The same parts of my brain get as excited as when I study bio or read a novel and write a paper on it.

Utada Hikaru

#26. I was trying to make a novel about something no one wanted to read about into something they couldn't put down or look away from.

Alexander Chee

#27. 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

#28. If you read a novel in more than two weeks you don't read the novel really.

Philip Roth

#29. The Sugar Frosted Nutsack is fantastic. It's volcanic and sexy and utterly unlike anything I've read before. It feels like the future in a dazzling way that has nothing to do with looking backward. It's been a long wait for a new novel from Mark Leyner, but worth it. Ten out of ten from me.

Douglas Coupland

#30. 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

#31. My own novel, 'The Silver Bough,' about the inhabitants of a remote town at risk of being overwhelmed by Scotland's mythological past, was once criticised by a disgruntled fan as 'fantasy for people who don't read fantasy.'

Lisa Tuttle

#32. I like all sorts of things, not necessarily just Victorian. Even though I tend to read a lot of Victorian novels, I like a lot of contemporary stuff.

Colin Meloy

#33. The first proper mystery novel that I read was 'Murder On the Orient Express' with a gaunt David Niven and a cherubic Peter Ustinov on the cover. 'Orient Express,' you'll recall, is the one where everyone did it, which delighted me no end, and I was immediately hooked.

Adrian McKinty

#34. One cannot read a novel without ascribing to the heroine the traits of the one we love.

Alain De Botton

#35. Read like mad. But try to do it analytically - which can be hard, because the better and more compelling a novel is, the less conscious you will be of its devices. It's worth trying to figure those devices out, however: they might come in useful in your own work.

Sarah Waters

#36. I've never had time to read. But no one ever kept me from finishing a novel I loved.

Daniel Pennac

#37. [Mark] Twain is pointing at you. You, the reader of the book one hundred and thirty years ago and today. That is what has made it a great American novel and the most widely read book in American Literature around the world today.

Hal Holbrook

#38. My life is an open book looking for chapters of love to fill my lonely pages.
-Michelle Carithers
read more A Daughter's Worth-A Novel

Michelle Carithers

#39. 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

#40. Even the geekiest of guys could get the girl if he read every romance novel that came out in any given month.

Teresa Medeiros

#41. As an editor, I read Charlotte Rogan's amazing debut novel, 'The Lifeboat,' when it was still in manuscript. I read it in one night, and I really wanted my company to publish it, but we lost it to another house. It's such a wonderful combination of beautiful writing and suspenseful storytelling.

Karen Thompson Walker

#42. Someone who hasn't read a novel doesn't really know what it's about, William.

John Irving

#43. My first YA novel, not many people have read. It's a fickle business. There's a degree of timing and luck involved.

Gayle Forman

#44. I read a script or I read a project or I read a novel and I know that I'm going to spend two to three years of my life with that, exclusively. So you better like it. There better be an honorable, real need to make that movie.

Robert Schwentke

#45. Simply put, you can read a story in a single sitting and hold it all in your mind. You can experience all of its rhythms, beginning to end, during that span. Consequently it has, I think, greater emotional power than a novel because of this real-time effect. Stories can stun you.

Adam Ross

#46. Daisy had known the novel was silly even as she had read it, but that had not detracted one bit from her enjoyment.

Lisa Kleypas

#47. Yell: "I'm beginning to read Italo Calvino's new novel!" Or if you prefer, don't say anything; just hope they'll leave you alone.

Italo Calvino

#48. When we're done with it, we may find - if it's a good novel - that we're a bit different from what we were before we read it, that we have been changed a little, as if by having meet a new face, crossed a street we've never crossed before.

Ursula K. Le Guin

#49. The last romantic novel I think I read was 'Tess of the d'Urbervilles.'

Bartlett Sher

#50. I try not to imagine what it would feel like if I leaned forward and kissed her, but with her this close, I'm really wishing I'd have already somehow read every romance novel ever written, because what the hell makes a kiss book-worthy? I need to know so I can make it happen.

Colleen Hoover

#51. Being published is not a necessary validation or a path everyone wants to take with their work. Writing - and finishing - a novel is a great thing in itself, whether or not the book is published, or becomes widely-read or not.

Garth Nix

#52. Books of quick interest, that hurry on for incidents are for the eye to glide over only. It will not do to read them out. I could never listen to even the better kind of modern novels without extreme irksomeness.

Charles Lamb

#53. I had been an abject fan of Robert Stone since the early eighties, when I borrowed a copy of 'A Flag for Sunrise' to read on a plane to Rome. I was twenty-something, with a first novel under my belt.

Madison Smartt Bell

#54. A novel is too much of a commitment. I tend to peruse Twitter - I check to see if I had any mentions and read the latest messages.

Kevin Nealon

#55. 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

#56. To read a novel is a difficult and complex art. You must be capable not only of great fineness of perception, but of great boldness of imagination.

Virginia Woolf

#57. 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

#58. As far as I can tell, a young adult novel is a regular novel that people actually read.

Stephen Colbert

#59. I read the novel I had been writing for several months with an odd sense that it was the work of a stranger. I usually work in the dead hours of night and surprising the manuscript mid-morning revealed the flaws and excesses it was trying to conceal.

Chloe Thurlow

#60. Other people's history can be read comfortably, the way a novel can be read comfortably. By my own history? I'm on the run from my own history, and catching my breath in the present. Escapist. But the merciless present pushes us back again toward our history. The mind keeps talking.

Intizar Hussain

#61. My work is less violent because we tend to write what we want to read ... and I'm not that interested in gruesome books. Any violence, to fit in well with a crime novel, has to have compassion.

Ann Cleeves

#62. When was the last time you heard a long passage from a novel read aloud during Sunday school or worship? Or how about the last time a youth pastor subverted his or her "talk" through satire or parable rather than proof texting the six main points? Yet

Sarah Arthur

#63. 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

#64. There're no novels that I like to read so I write my own novels, and then I read them again, and it's the best thing.

Willow Smith

#65. Well, in that case, no. I'm not your father. But if you go with another definition, meaning 'a man who wants to be in your life and help raise you,' then yes. I am.

Jenna Evans Welch

#66. 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

#67. One of the first serious attempts I made to write a novel was when I was in Grade 6 and I had read 'Matilda.' I wrote my own version and my teacher had it bound and permitted me to read it to the class - cementing my love of reading, writing and Roald Dahl!

Randa Abdel-Fattah

#68. Every mystery novel I ever read, the great detective was such an arrogant fuck you could replace 70% of his dialogue with 'Are you stupid?' and the conversation would still make sense.

NisiOisiN

#69. To read a novel is to wonder constantly, even at moments when we lose ourselves most deeply in the book: How much of this is fantasy, and how much is real?

Orhan Pamuk

#70. I can never forget that Chinese student I knew in Paris - Mr. Tcheou, I think it was. One day, upon asking him if he had ever read Hamlet, he answered: "You mean that novel by Jack London?

Henry Miller

#71. Every time I write a new novel about something sombre and sobering and terrible I think, 'oh Lord, they're not going to want to go here'. But they do. Readers of fiction read, I think, for a deeper embrace of the world, of reality. And that's brave.

Barbara Kingsolver

#72. I'm guessing you're tits deep in a horror novel. Something by Laymon, or Ketchum, or one of those sick fucks you read.

Kyle M. Scott

#73. I just want people to finish the book and say, 'I was entertained.' When I set out to do it, I had no deal in place. I knew it would be tough. I read somewhere that John Steinbeck was turned down 22 times on his first novel. But I was just going to do it.

Marv Levy

#74. When I'm working on a serious and solid book ... I read about a detective novel a day. It's the best legal dope in the world. It makes you feel good until the next morning you can work again.

Mary Lee Settle

#75. I actually have a little time to read, so I'm indulging in the newest Laurelin Paige novel, full of lust and sex and lots of romance. Romance novels are my biggest guilty pleasure. And this woman can write.

Kristen Proby

#76. I hope to read a Harry Potter novel soon, to see what it's all about. I admit to being annoyed that many good light fantasy writers have had trouble getting published, in England and elsewhere, when it is obvious the readers were waiting for us all along.

Piers Anthony

#77. If I had scenes that were so boring I didn't want to write them, then there was no way anyone would want to read them. This was my novel, after all. If I didn't love it, no one would.

Rachel Aaron

#78. I love a novel that's funny, and The Taxman Cometh is very funny, delightfully well-written, yet with a serious message about how government bureaucracy affects us all. Read. Enjoy. And if a comparison to Catch 22 pops into your mind, that's not surprising.

Marvin Kalb

#79. I recently spoke at a university where a student told me it was such a shame that Nigerian men were physical abusers like the father character in my novel. I told him that I had recently read a novel called American Psycho,and that it was a shame that young Americans were serial murderers.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

#80. The wildest ride in modern crime novel exoticum. A novel so steeped in milieu that it feels as if you've blasted to mars in the grip of a demon who won't let you go. Read this book, savor the language-it's the last-and the most compelling word in thrillers.

James Ellroy

#81. I wanted to write something that was very entertaining to read. The hardest part of this novel [The Yoga of Max's Discontent] was how to make a deeply spiritual transformation journey page-turning and adventurous. That was the hardest part to crack for me.

Karan Bajaj

#82. I never read a novel, they have so little real life and thought in them.

Henry David Thoreau

#83. Virginia Woolf's great novel, 'Mrs. Dalloway,' is the first great book I ever read. I read it almost by accident when I was in high school, when I was 15 years old.

Michael Cunningham

#84. Writing, and especially writing a novel, where you get to sit in a room by yourself with either a pen and a paper or a computer for a couple of years, is a very solitary occupation. You can read sales figures - a hundred thousand books sold, half a million books sold - but they are just numbers.

Neil Gaiman

#85. I've always enjoyed that kind of thing - thinking about the production of narrative and why it is that when we read a novel, we don't notice the fact that someone who might be very close-mouthed or tight-lipped is perfectly willing to tell us a story in 600 or 700 pages.

Matthew Tobin Anderson

#86. I would come, many years later, to understand why 'To Kill A Mockingbird' is considered 'an important novel', but when I first read it at 11, I was simply absorbed by the way it evoked the mysteries of childhood, of treasures discovered in trees, and games played with an exotic summer friend.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

#87. Your case gives me new hope," I said to him. "With me, more and more often I happen to pick up a novel that has just appeared and I find myself reading the same book I have read a hundred times.

Italo Calvino

#88. There are many ways to read a novel. We read sometimes logically, sometimes with our eyes, sometimes with our imagination, sometimes with a small part of our mind, sometimes the way we want to, sometimes the way the book wants us to, and sometimes with every fiber of our being.

Orhan Pamuk

#89. You should read the novel in order to live, to feel, to tell someone the hidden secret of it.
Read as if its your story, search your character in it.
You should never read a book, if you feel ashamed of telling its story ...
Respect book or never read it.

Emma Brynstein

#90. History is an ongoing novel, but if we don't learn from what we read and see we are doomed to repeat the mistakes of history.

Tony Brooks

#91. One thing I had learned in college was that if you ever had a question about truth, reality, or the meaning of existence, read a novel by Albert Camus. Pretty soon you'll be so baffled you'll forget the question.

Gary Reilly

#92. What's the challenge in writing a novel that few people will read? I'm more than happy writing what I do and have no plans to change that.

Nicholas Sparks

#93. Reading a book is like re-writing it for yourself. You bring to a novel, anything you read, all your experience of the world. You bring your history and you read it in your own terms.

Angela Carter

#94. It reminded him of a science fiction novel that he'd read once; in it, the characters had a tendency to say ominously that 'winter was coming' and Sin had to fight the urge to say the words out loud with the exact same ominous feeling behind.

Ais

#95. One day someone is going to read my autobiography and say Wow, what a horror novel

M.F. Moonzajer

#96. Please read this [book] so I'll have someone to talk about it with? I'll get you cigarettes.

Fiona Staples

#97. It's a lucky man who leaves early from life's banquet, before he's drained to the dregs his goblet - full of wine; yes, it's a lucky man who has not read life's novel to the end, but has been wise enough to part with it abruptly - like me with my Onegin.

Alexander Pushkin

#98. My first novel, 'You Lost Me There,' has been described as a beach read. Tough bracket, beach reads. There's not much room for mistakes when you're competing against the sun for a person's attention.

Rosecrans Baldwin

#99. his look was both self-congratulatory and full of cynical cruelty. I came home, conscious of a feeling of disgust so much more powerful than usual that I sat down and made myself read the novel for the first time since it was published.

Doris Lessing

#100. Instead of making myself write the book I ought to write, the novel that was expected of me, I conjured up the book I myself would have liked to read, the sort by an unknown writer, from another age and another country, discovered in an attic. ITALO CALVINO

Salman Rushdie