Novel Quotes

1. "My novels are about the European reality, not about chases. You want chases, get somebody else's books."
Author: Alan Furst

2. "Even beyond the Middle East, the role of the independent women remains as warped as a Lewis Caroll novel. We may control $12 trillion of the world's $184 trillion in annual consumer spending (I read it in Newsweek), and yet our self-worth apparently ccomes in a shampoo bottle ("because you're worth it")."
Author: Amy Mowafi

3. "Maybe everyone does have a novel in them, perhaps even a great one. I don't believe it, but for the purposes of this argument, let's say it's so. Only a few of us are going to be willing to break our own hearts by trading in the living beauty of imagination for the stark disappointment of words."
Author: Ann Patchett

4. "Of those of us who comprise the real clan of the book, who read not to judge the reading of others but to take the measure of ourselves. Of those of us who read because we love it more than anything, who feel about bookstores the way some people feel about jewelers. The silence about this was odd, both because there are so many of us and because we are what the world of books is really about. We are the people who once waited for the newest installment of Dickens's latest novel and who kept battered copies of Catcher in the Rye in our back pockets and backpacks. We are the ones who saw to it that Pride and Prejudice never went out of print."
Author: Anna Quindlen

5. "New Rule: Gun-control people have to stop pressuring Starbucks to ban guns. I want my gun nuts overcaffeinated, twitchy, and accident-prone. That way, the problem will take care of itself. Plus, if just one gun nut kills just one pseudo-intellectual writing a screenplay-slash-graphic-novel on his iPad, natural selection is doing its job."
Author: Bill Maher

6. "Those who are in the orbit, but nonetheless on the edges, can often be the real discoverers. It was why at times, the journalist, the historian and even the novelist paints the fullest picture of an era"
Author: Bob Woodward

7. "A novel is not a summary of its plot but a collection of instances, of luminous specific details that take us in the direction of the unsaid and unseen."
Author: Charles Baxter

8. "I was at once content and stimulated with what I saw: I liked what I had seen, and wished to see more. Yet, for a long time, I treated you distantly, and sought your company rarely. I was an intellectual epicure, and wished to prolong the gratification of making this novel and piquant acquaintance: besides, I was for a while troubled with a haunting fear that if I handled the flower freely its bloom would fade-the sweet charm of freshness would leave it. I did not then know that it was no transitory blossom; but rather the radiant resemblance of one, cut in an indestructible gem."
Author: Charlotte Brontë

9. "In the course of her education she had gone through the history usually put into the hands of young people... now her ripened reason gave to her present study at least the advantage of novelty."
Author: Charlotte Smith

10. "[…] detective novels are not novels of detection, still less of revelation, still less of solution. Those are all necessary, but not only are they insufficient, but they are in certain ways regrettable. These are novels of potentiality. Quantum narratives. Their power isn't in their final acts, but in the profusion of superpositions before them, the could-bes, what-ifs and never-knows. Until that final chapter, each of those is as real and true as all the others, jostling realities all dreamed up by the crime, none trapped in vulgar facticity. That's why the most important sentence in a murder mystery isn't the one starting ‘The murderer is…' – which no matter how necessary and fabulously executed is an act of unspeakable narrative winnowing – but is the snarled expostulation halfway through: ‘Everyone's a suspect.' Quite. When all those suspects become one certainty, it's a collapse, and a let-down. How can it not be? We've been banished from an Eden of oscillation."
Author: China Miéville

11. "How I would enjoy being told the novel is dead. How liberating to work in the margins, outside a central perception. You are the ghoul of literature."
Author: Don DeLillo

12. "Story ideas had never been a problem for him, there'd always been more ideas than time to write them, he'd reject one perfectly good notion because he fell more simpatico toward a different one. But of course he could never go back to any of those ancient story stubs, they wouldn't still have juice in them.For him, creating a novel was like gardening; you choose your seed, you treat it exactly the way the package says, and gradually a thing of beauty - or of sturdiness, or of nutrition - grows up and becomes yours. The seed you don't nurture doesn't wait to be doted over later; it shrivels and dies."
Author: Donald E. Westlake

13. "Actually, I enjoy the process of writing a big long novel."
Author: Donna Tartt

14. "That pissed me the hell off. I took in a deep breath and blurted out everything without thinking twice. "Fuck you! You want to know who I am, Marcus. Well here it goes! I am temperamental, over-sensitive, and outspoken. I'm honest! I cry at stupid love movies, and I'm a sucker for a romantic novel. I don't allow people to walk all over me, I have trust issues, and I have insecurities. I've slept with four men in my entire life! And the one thing I don't do is take shit from men who try to act like they're better than me as if they don't have any hidden skeletons! I'm not keeping shit hidden, how ‘bout you? You can fuck off. I'll find my own way home. Have a nice fucking life!" - Mia"
Author: E.L. Montes

15. "Literature is love. I think it went like this: drawings in the cave, sounds in the cave, songs in the cave, songs about us. Later, stories about us. Part of what we always did was have sex and fight about it and break each other's hearts. I guess there's other kinds of love too. Great friendships. Working together. But poetry and novels are lists of our devotions. We love the feel of making the marks as the feelings are rising and falling. Living in literature and love is the best thing there is. You're always home."
Author: Eileen Myles

16. "Better and happier those who, recognizing that everything is fictitious, write the novel before someone writes it for them and, like Machiavelli, don courtly garments to write in secret."
Author: Fernando Pessoa

17. "The hallmarks of the noir style are fear, guilt and loneliness, breakdown and despair, sexual obsession and social corruption, a sense that the world is controlled by, malignant forces preying on us, a rejection of happy endings and a preference for resolutions heavy with doom, but always redeemed by a breathtakingly vivid poetry of word (if the work was a novel or story) or image (if it was a movie). ("Introduction")"
Author: Francis M. Nevins

18. "In March of that year, I saw a man named Paul Barkley shot to death. It happened late at night in the parking lot of a café in Santa Rosa called Galileo's. /Teller: A Novel"
Author: Frederick Weisel

19. "The least step forward in the domain of free thought and individual life has been achieved in all ages to the accompaniment of physical and intellectual tortures: and not only the mere step forward, no! but every form of movement and change has rendered necessary innumerable martyrs, throughout the entire course of thousands of years which sought their paths and laid down their foundation-stones, years, however, which we do not think of when we speak about "world-history," that ridiculously small division of mankind's existence. And even in this so-called world-history, which in the main is merely a great deal of noise about the latest novelties, there is no more important theme than the old, old tragedy of the martyrs who tried to move the mire."
Author: Friedrich Nietzsche

20. "My big dream back then was to buy an IBM Selectric. I still have that dream. I really ought to buy a word-processor. Half the cabbies at Rocky own computers. They tell me they can write failed novels ten times faster on a PC."
Author: Gary Reilly

21. "A writer discovers what he knows as he knows it, i.e., as he makes it. No artist writes in order to objectify an "idea" already formed. It is the poem or novel or story that quite precisely tells him what he didn't know he knew: he knows, that is, only in terms of his writing. This is, of course, simply another way of saying that literary composition is not the placing of a held idea into a waiting form."
Author: Gilbert Sorrentino

22. "Q: What literary complexities do you find most interesting? That is, what do you like most to "solve," so to speak, as a novelist?A: One wishes to create characters who will speak directly to the minds of comparative literature professors and intelligent book reviewers."
Author: Gilbert Sorrentino

23. "A logic proof is: you get a starting point and an ending point, and you have to get there through all these different steps and tautologies. I approach novel writing that way. When I get to the end I have to go back and connect everything."
Author: Heidi Julavits

24. "Heart isn't something you find in soap operas and Harlequin novels. It's that pure essence–sheltered deep inside–that occasionally makes its way to the surface. Give heed lest it ever trend to waste."
Author: James D. Maxon

25. "I am a master of fiction. I am also the greatest crime writer who ever lived. I am to the crime novel in specific what Tolstoy is to the Russian novel and what Beethoven is to music."
Author: James Ellroy

26. "The person, be it gentleman or lady, who has not pleasure in a good novel, must be intolerably stupid."
Author: Jane Austen

27. "If living is to progress, if you are lucky, from foolishness to wisdom, then to write novels is to broadcast the various stages of your foolishness."
Author: Jane Smiley

28. "Oh, that sound? I'm in the hot tub, reading a novel."
Author: Jane Smiley

29. "At college, I was told there were four great women novelists in the 19th century – Jane Austen, George Eliot, Charlotte and Emily Brontë. Not one of them led an enviable life – all of them had to sacrifice ludicrously in order to be writers. I wasn't prepared to do that.You could become ill so that you could retreat to the bedroom, avoid your domestic responsibilities and write like Emily Dickinson and Christina Rossetti. You had to forget about writing if you weren't prepared to sacrifice any other things you might want from life, like kids or lovers. It's not like that now."
Author: Jeanette Winterson

30. "Doctor, do you read the Harry Potter books?" "Well, as a matter of fact, yes, I have." "The fourth was my favorite. What was yours?" "Umm, I don't know really." "Is it possible," the prosecutor asked the witness, "that those writings of Mr. Kobel are merely attempts at writing a novel? Some big fantasy book." "I…I can't imagine it." "But it's possible, isn't it?" "I suppose. But I'll tell you, he'll never sell the movie rights."
Author: Jeffery Deaver

31. "Last week I was just someone who had had a first novel published."
Author: Jon McGregor

32. "... he said it felt like walking into another century, being there, looking up at the mullion windows, all darkened now, and the castellated towers that rose up out of the clutch of the ivy. "And you," he said, "you look like the heroine of a nineteenth-century novel, with your beautifully serious face and your grave, grey eyes. So do you have a suitably romantic story to tell?"
Author: Justine Picardie

33. "Fiction had never been Jackson's thing. Facts seemed challenging enough without making stuff up. What he discovered was that the great novels of the world were about three things - death, money and sex. Occasionally a whale."
Author: Kate Atkinson

34. "Letters orchestrated into a song of words create the symphony of a novel."
Author: Leslie Austin

35. "I'm not embarrassed about the novels I wrote when I was younger, but I couldn't write them today because of my religion."
Author: Louise Mensch

36. "But marrying within one's own family can get monotonous. One has heard all the same family stories, knows all the jokes and all the same recipes. No novelty."
Author: Margaret George

37. "I love writing novels, even if only a few thousand people read them. Here's my soul; I hope it appeals to your soul."
Author: Mark O'Donnell

38. "Like my hero Virginia Woolf, I do lack confidence. I always find that the novel I'm finishing, even if it's turned out fairly well, is not the novel I had in my mind. I think a lot of writers must negotiate this, and if they don't admit it, they're not being honest."
Author: Michael Cunningham

39. "All that's needed now is a great novel that will capture the imagination of the public - move them, enrage them, thrill them, terrify them, scandalize them. A story that will seize them by the hand and lead them into the streets where they've never dared set foot, a tale that throws back the sheets from acts never shown and voices never heard. A tale that fearlessly points the finger at those who are to blame..."
Author: Michael Farber

40. "Graphic novels are such a visually creative world - it's really interesting what they can do in one sketch. Now I'm hooked."
Author: Michelle MacLaren

41. "I'm equally sure, however, that I won't walk into a lamp-post while reading {literature}, like I did with {a legal thriller} all those years ago; you don't walk into lamp-posts when you're reading literary novels, do you?"
Author: Nick Hornby

42. "I started a novel back in high school. It wasn't very good. It was the opposite of good. The writing itself wasn't too bad, and the characters were interesting. But the story was a mess, and it was full of fantasy cliches. Dwarf with an axe. Barbarian warrior. I don't ever think I'd bother finishing that. It's just not worth my time."
Author: Patrick Rothfuss

43. "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."
Author: Piers Anthony

44. "Short fiction is the medium I love the most, because it requires that I bring everything I've learned about poetry - the concision, the ability to say something as vividly as possible - but also the ability to create a narrative that, though lacking a novel's length, satisfies the reader."
Author: Ron Rash

45. "What he felt during his Spanish encounter with left-wing anti-Christianity was similar to his reactions to the anti-Christianity of the right. The "novelty and shock of the Nazis", Auden wrote, and the blitheness with which Hitler's acolytes dismissed Christianity "on the grounds that to love one's neighbor as oneself was a command fit only for effeminate weaklings", pushed him inexorably toward unavoidable questions. "If, as I am convinced, the Nazis are wrong and we are right, what is it that validates our values and invalidates theirs?" The answer to this question, he wrote later, was part of what "brought me back to the church."
Author: Ross Douthat

46. "We have no general conceptual thrust for the band, other than trying to make music that keeps our interest. When things are novel, they are probably things we have discovered by accident or investigation rather than by design."
Author: Steve Albini

47. "No wonder you want to be a writer. How can you not, with all that behind you? You practically are a novel already."
Author: Sylvia Brownrigg

48. "I probably reread novels more often than I read new ones. The novel form is made for rereading. Novels are by their nature too long, too baggy, too full of things – you can't hold them completely in your mind. This isn't a flaw – it's part of the novel's richness: its length, multiplicity of aspects, and shapelessness resemble the length and shapelessness of life itself. By the time you reach the end of the novel you will have forgotten the beginning and much of what happens in between: not the main outlines but the fine work, the detail and the music of the sentences – the particular words, through which the novel has its life. You think you know a novel so well that there must be nothing left in it to discover but the last time I reread Emma I found a little shepherd boy, brought into the parlour to sing for Harriet when she's staying with the Martin family. I'm sure he was never in the book before.http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2012/..."
Author: Tessa Hadley

49. "He believed, as I did, that we are helpless to resist or influence what our hearts are bound to do." - Z - A Novel of Zelda Fitzgerald"
Author: Therese Anne Fowler

50. "As a novelist, where do you go to tap into memories, and impressions, and sensations? It's usually, in my experience, your early life, before you started thinking of yourself as a writer, because somehow those experiences are unadulterated."
Author: William Boyd

Novel Quotes Pictures