Quotes & Sayings About Novels

Novels are just another kind of cross-dressing, aren't they? — John Irving

Novels with a "thesis" don't interest me. They just don't - novels that want to "show" something, that want to "argue" something specific. I don't read novels that are looking to convince me of anything. — Sergio Chejfec

I stood my ground, staring straight into his eyes. "You didn't do anything to me. Since when is sex so life or death to you?" -Abby Abernathy
"Since it was with you!" -Travis Maddox — Jamie McGuire

I mentioned early in this book the kind of rereading distinctive of a fan
the Tolkien addict, say, or the devotee of Jane Austen or Trollope or the Harry Potter books. The return to such books is often motivated by a desire to dwell for a time in a self-contained fictional universe, with its own boundaries and its own rules. (It is a moot question whether Austen and Trollope's first readers were drawn to their novels for these reasons, but their readers today often are.) Such rereading is not purely a matter of escapism, even though that is one reason for its attraction: we should note that it's not what readers are escaping from but that they are escaping into that counts most. Most of us do not find fictional worlds appealing because we find our own lives despicable, though censorious people often make that assumption. Auden once wrote that "there must always be ... escape-art, for man needs escape as he needs food and deep sleep." The sleeper does not disdain consciousness. — Alan Jacobs

What do you do when Mom leaves you alone like this? (Kat)
I write romance novels. (Acheron) — Sherrilyn Kenyon

Why should a novelist not also be a historian? To force unnatural divisions within the English language is to work against its capacious and accommodating nature. To expect a writer to produce only novels, or only histories, is equivalent to demanding from a composer that he or she write only string quartets or piano sonatas. — Peter Ackroyd

Novelists of a conservative or more purely aesthetic bent hold up better on the surface, but their novels go in and out of fashion according to relevance or irrelevance. — Jane Smiley

I retraced my steps, walked up to her, and in another moment would have certainly said, "Madam!" if I had not known that that exclamation had been made a thousand times before in all Russian novels of high life. It was that alone that stopped me. — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

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

I loved reading historical novels when I was young, but I definitely don't think I wrote one. When I read my book through, when it was completely done and in printed galleys, I was surprised by how uninterested in the passage of time and history the book seemed to be. Even though you can feel it all there, that's just not what it's focused on. — Danielle Dutton

You sing about the things you're influenced by. So we've been big into sci-fi since we were kids, things like Star Trek etc. Then came movies like Terminator and Dune. Burton is also a really big reader and loves sci-fi novels which helps him write. It's also really cool he does that because it's through the perspective of how we see things going or possibly going. — Dino Cazares

I think a writer's first job is to entertain, even in novels: to tell a compelling story that pulls the reader along toward an end. At the same time, the best stories are character-driven. — Noah Hawley

We never looked quite right on paper, but that's what made us so great. We were exactly what we wanted to be ... and that was happy. — Hope Alcocer

When I do a novel, I don't really use the script, I use the book; when I did Apocalypse Now, I used Heart of Darkness. Novels usually have so much rich material. — Francis Ford Coppola

If I can keep writing just one good page a day, I will have 15 published novels in my expected lifetime. Tick, tick, tick... — Barry James Hickey

I'd love to see more novels and short stories where the characters have their own folklore that isn't the Plot-Bearing Prophecy of Doom. — Marie Brennan

I got my love of animals from the Dr. Doolittle books and my love of Africa from the Tarzan novels. I remember my mum taking me to the first Tarzan film, which starred Johnny Weissmuller, and bursting into tears. It wasn't what I had imagined at all. — Jane Goodall

For me, having it all is being paid to write novels. — Candace Bushnell

Whenever anyone declares having read a book of mine I am disappointed by the error. That's because my books are not to be read in the sense usually called reading: the only way it seems to me to approach the novels that I write is to catch them in the same manner that one catches an illness. — Antonio Lobo Antunes

I thought I deserved them, the sort of people you found only in novels. Quick — Jessie Burton

Editors seek out the first novels with the seductiveness of Don Juans; the pleasure of discovery is one of the obvious reasons. — William Targ

When I was probably about 10 or 11, and I found it was simply something I could do. When you're at school and you do something and you get praised for it, you think, "Oh, right, well I'll do that." From then on, I always thought I'd be a writer. I thought novels at first, and then I sort of naturally drifted into TV. — Steven Knight

While the subject matter of my novels could not be further removed from the stuff I used to trot out at the Comedy Store, the delivery of the material employs many of the same techniques. — Mark Billingham

If I had killed Crow off I can think of least six novels I would never have written, 400,000 words' worth of very necessary experience. — Brian Lumley

Men are from Mars and Women are from Venus. Where are Angels like you are from? — Amit Kalantri

Ivanov: And this whole romance of ours is commonplace and trite: he lost heart, and he lost his way. She came along, strong and brave in spirit, and gave him an helping hand. That's all very well and plausible in novels, but in life ...
Sasha: In life it's the same.
Ivanov: I see you have a fine understanding of life! — Anton Chekhov

Librarians are amazing like that. They will hand you a book they know will make your eyes bug out because they know that is the point of novels, not to satisfy but to surprise. — Max Barry

I don't separate my books into historical novels and the rest. To me, they're all made-up worlds, and both kinds are borne out of curiosity, some investigation into the past. — Peter Carey

All the best novels are about one thing: how we go on. The characters must survive the fallout of their own cowardice, folly, denial or misguided passion. They squander what matters most, and still they pick up the pieces. — Julia Glass

A good novel, one which entices the author as much as it beckons the reader. — W.J. Raymond

And then I realized that my sister was trying to LIVE a romance novel.
Man, that takes courage and imagination. Well, it also took some degree of mental illness, too, but I was suddenly happy for her.
And a little scared. Well, a lot scared. — Sherman Alexie

I've never been much for tears, anyway. — Ed Brubaker

If you ask a twenty-one-year-old poet whose poetry he likes, he might say, unblushing, "Nobody's," In his youth, he has not yet understood that poets like poetry, and novelists like novels; he himself likes only the role, the thought of himself in a hat. — Annie Dillard

My spirit has been around far longer than my soul
I've lived several lifetimes already. And one this novel has been written, I will have lived several more. — Terry A. O'Neal

She didn't know Matt had followed her until he grabbed her shoulder, halting her headlong rush to nowhere. He turned her into his arms, pulled her against his chest, crushed her mouth in a searing kiss.
"Shane," he said when he raised his head from hers. "I love you. I love you."
Her heart opened and the wall inside her trembled as she clung to him. "Burn me up, Matt," she said, her voice a ragged whisper. "Burn it away. Please, please, burn it all away."
She heard him growl deep in his throat and he lifted her into his arms in one swift movement.
As he carried her back across the parking lot and through the door of her room, she rained kisses on his neck and the hard line of his jaw. His skin was warm and damp and tasted of salt and desire. — Jane Taylor Starwood

It happened as it always did, swallowing her swiftly and completely. Intense. Painful. Quick, vivid colors spun beneath her eyelids. Sounds were sharp inside her skull. Fire shot up through her bones. She may have been screaming and she wouldn't have known. There was smoke in her nose, thick and black, and she couldn't breathe. It stung her eyes and licked at her skin. Wood and metal crashed down as skin blistered and popped and she knew this wasn't her, knew it was someone else, someone with a bigger body, bigger boots and darker jeans, and big ol' hands with scars on the fingers. Men's hands. Nails blunt and dirty with oil and grease and burning and- The cars were on fire. Paper burned and curled and rags ignited, the cement floor pockmarked by flash fires. Meat withered in her nose and she realized it was her. Him. Dancing embers blackened and burned bone. He screamed and she hoped she was not. He writhed and she really hoped she was not. He was dying, dead, and- — Angele Gougeon

There is ... a big aspect of play in writing novels, and making the story more and more elaborate is just more and more fun. — Gish Jen

Semua orang pernah patah hati. All you have to do is move on. — Nina Ardianti

Daisy Bowman, Lillian's young sister, had an out-sized personality that belied her small, slight frame. Idealistic and possessed of a decidedly whimsical bent, she devoured romantic novels populated with rogues and villains. However, Daisy's elfin facade concealed a shrewd intelligence that most people tended to overlook. She was fair-skinned and dark-haired, with eyes the color of spiced gingerbread... mischievous eyes with long, spiky lashes. — Lisa Kleypas

Love isn't about holding on. It's about letting go. — Jacqueline Simon Gunn

No man sings as beautifully as when his song is accompanied by a woman's voice. — Roman Payne

After I had written more than a dozen adult genre novels, an editor I knew in New York asked me to write a mystery for young adults. — Rodman Philbrick

I'm a big fan of a lot of graphic novels - 'Fables,' 'Y: The Last Man' and 'The Walking Dead,' which I like a lot more. — Cobie Smulders

All the great novels are about obsession and people who are obsessed. — Marty Rubin

It's only in bad novels that people are divided into two camps and have nothing to do with each other. In real life everything gets mixed up! Don't you think you'd have to be a hopeless nonentity to play only one role all your life, to have only one place in society, always to stand for the same thing?
Ah, there you are!
- Larissa Fyodorovna in Doctor Zhivago. — Boris Pasternak

I feel like I don't understand time in novels, really. I bumble forward, is all. — Elizabeth McCracken

Will Cato's alien buddies come en masse and invade Earth? He's not sure but he'll try to keep humanity in the loop. — John Hopkins

It's where my mother hopes to read classic novels again one day when she isn't working nine days a week, — A.S. King

After 20 years, a million written words, and nine rejected novels, I finally landed a book contract. — J.A. Konrath

All pomp and show." Anjali's glare at the house would've exploded bricks if she'd had superhuman powers. "A fat cow needs a big barn. — Nicola Marsh

It's not goodbye, Sam. It's see you in two days. I promise ... " she said stroking his hair away from his dimpled cheek.
"I'm counting on it. You will be missed," he said as he put her hand on his chest near his heart. "You will be missed right here ... — Rachel Hanna

What are American dry-goods? asked the duchess, raising her large hands in wonder and accentuating the verb.
American novels, answered Lord Henry. — Oscar Wilde

Ghosts from the past weave spells in the present to draw a veil of secrecy over the future. — Sean Best

I was going to make him forget, too. He would forget every woman who came before me, every moment that I wasn't a part of, every dream he had that didn't include me. Starting now. — Emma Nichols

Mysteries include so many things: the noir novel, espionage novel, private eye novels, thrillers, police procedurals. But the pure detective story is where there's a detective and a criminal who's committed a murder and leaves clues for the detective and the careful reader to find. — Otto Penzler

I've had a dozen novels published and have made far more than a dozen mistakes. Which is why Randy Susan Meyers and I wrote a guidebook to help authors avoid making our mistakes. — M.J. Rose

Even when there's not a joke or a hook, the first line has to be good and snapem to attention. Songs ain't novels. You don't have 30 pages to slowly wrap somebody in. They're more like short stories or poems. If the first line hasn't grabbed them, you won't get to the second line. Once you've developed an audience, you may have some luxury and trust, so you don't have to knock 'em over the head with line one. — Dan Bern

You have started the book with this bubble over your head that contains a cathedral full of fire - that contains a novel so vast and great and penetrating and bright and dark that it will put all other novels ever written to shame. And then, as you get towards the end, you begin to realise, no, it's just this book. — Michael Cunningham

This is everything I thought I didn't want. Or didn't need. But I'm here now and it's everything I need and the only thing I want. — Tamara Lush

Few novels or plays could exist without at least one troublemaker in the group, and perhaps life couldn't either. — Mignon McLaughlin

So the Bawdy Bluestocking was the proprietress of her own shop, selling lurid novels to ladies in the front and more esoteric fare in the back, from the looks of the shelves around him. He spied Pope and Crabbe, Shakespeare, of course, and names he did not recognize at all. He wondered how she chose her stock and where it came from. She must spend her days in endless research. The thought was unaccountably lovely to him. — Evelyn Pryce

When it comes to creating compelling fiction, the devil may be in the details, but it is your imagination that ultimately allows your work to spread its wings and take flight. And fly it must. Only by soaring above the clouds of doubt can one truly achieve a suspension of disbelief — Max Hawthorne

Lost: Heartbeat. Last seen being chased away by an Irishman's shameless grin. Reward if returned. — Whitney K.E.

I believe in the soul ... the small of a woman's back, the hanging curveball, high fiber, good scotch, that the novels of Susan Sontag are self-indulgent, overrated crap. I believe Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone. I believe there ought to be a constitutional amendment outlawing Astroturf and the designated hitter. I believe in the sweet spot, soft-core pornography, opening your presents Christmas morning rather than Christmas Eve, and I believe in long, slow, deep, soft, wet kisses that last three days. — Kevin Costner

I included receipts, faxes, newspaper clippings, all sorts of things. I've read novels composed entirely of emails or letters, but not assembled across this kind of mix of materials. I wanted to create the feeling of a detective going through a box of clues. — Brian Pinkerton

The light that radiates from the great novels time can never dim, for human existence is perpetually being forgotten by man and thus the novelists' discoveries, however old they may be, will never cease to astonish. — Milan Kundera

I had the feeling that focusing on objects and telling a story through them would make my protagonists different from those in Western novels - more real, more quintessentially of Istanbul. — Orhan Pamuk

Nonetheless, a question remains before us all the same: what is a novelist to do with ordinary, completely "usual" people, and how can he present them to the reader so as to make them at least somewhat interesting? To bypass them altogether in a story is quite impossible, because ordinary people are constantly and for the most part the necessary links in the chain of everyday events; in bypassing them we would thus violate plausibility. To fill novels with nothing but types or even simply, for the sake of interest, with strange and nonexistent people, would be implausible
and perhaps uninteresting as well. — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Growing up devouring horror comics and novels, and being inspired to become a writer because of horror novels, movies, and comic books, I always knew I was going to write a horror novel. — Colson Whitehead

If one writes or reads novels from the point of view of psychology, it is very inconsistent and petty to want to shy away from even the slowest and most detailed analysis of the most unnatural lusts, gruesome tortures, shocking infamy, and disgusting sensual or spiritual impotence. — Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel

Narratives have the same power, I think. Some readers of my novels ask me, "Why do you understand me?". That's a huge pleasure of mine because it means that readers and I can make our narratives relative. — Haruki Murakami

All novels must be autobiographical because I am the only material that I know. All of the characters are me. But at the same time, a novel is never autobiographical even if it describes the life of the author. Literary writing is a completely different medium. — John Banville

I grew up around books - my grandmother's house, where I lived as a small child, was full of books. My father was a history teacher, and he loved the Russian novels. There were always books around. — John Irving

Various books revolutionised what I think about novels and showed me that they're not strict, formulaic things. 'Coming Through Slaughter' by Michael Ondaatje was one of them. — Sarah Hall

If there's anything Trollope novels always take seriously, it is money - how it flows from one character to another, how it is managed, who has it, who deserves it, and what it means to a character, male or female. — Jane Smiley

One of the unfortunate things about creative writing courses is that they make people impatient. People feel that they have prepared themselves and that they must now do it. In fact there are positive incentives for doing so - universities are offering degrees for writing novels. — Robert Dessaix

She didn't deserve me. She deserved a hell of a lot better than me, but so help me, I wasn't good enough of a man to just let her go. — Nicole R. Locker

I don't want you to change, Bridgette. I'm not in love with who you could be, or who you used to be, or who the world says you should be. I'm in love with you. Right now. Just like this. — Colleen Hoover

She needed this. For the comfort, for the love, for all the glorious things she did not deserve and yet could not stop herself from wanting. — Madeline Martin

The only form of fiction in which real characters do not seem out of place is history. In novels they are detestable. — Oscar Wilde

My hands are in his hair and his arms wrap around my waist tighter. I know what Henry does to me. I'm space bound. A rocket about to blast off. And I want Henry to send me to the moon. — Lauren Hammond

Sex is in everything. All our novels, songs, films, all the stuff in the name of entertainment is nothing but marketing of sex in multiple and disguised forms. — Girdhar Joshi

This was the stuff of novels with
yeah
men like him on the cover. — Erin Kellison

Reality's kind of a medium, maybe greater than paper. We all want life to have the same texture that we read about in novels. — Why The Lucky Stiff

The latest gorgeous entry in the Belknap Press' growing library of annotated Jane Austen novels arrives, this time the mighty Emma under the exactingly careful guidance of Bharat Tandon of the University of East Anglia. Belknap has once again done its end of the job superbly: the book is a physical treat-luxuriantly over-sized, heavy with quality paper and solid binding, decked out in a beautiful cover and dozens of well-chosen illustrations throughout. This is one of the prettiest Jane Austen volumes available in bookstoresthis season. — Steve Donoghue

Novels are about other people and poems are about yourself — Philip Larkin

I write in order to understand the images. Being what my agent ... somewhat ruefully calls a language playwright, is problematic because in production, you have to make the language lift off the page. But a good actor can turn it into human speech. I err sometimes toward having such a compound of images that if an actor lands heavily on each one, you never pull through to a larger idea. That's a problem for the audience. But I come to playwriting from the visual world - I used to be a painter. I also really love novels and that use of language. But it's tricky to ask that of the theatre. — Ellen McLaughlin

Is it not superfluous to write more than one novel if the writer has not become, say, a new man? Obviously, all the novels of an author not infrequently belong together and are to a certain degree only one novel. — Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel

Before novels written by women were relegated to their own 'genre,' I was introduced to Jane Smiley by a dear professor who raised my awareness of what female authors were bringing to the table of contemporary fiction. — Emma McLaughlin

The only thing that matters to me about my stories is that they're entertaining and they're funny. And I tend to get bored easily, so I generally throw something supernatural in. I would say they're humorous novels that have a supernatural bent, but that's as close as you're going to get to fitting them all in the same basket. — Christopher Moore

I am one of the writers who wish to create serious works of literature which dissociate themselves from those novels which are mere reflections of the vast consumer cultures of Tokyo and the subcultures of the world at large. — Kenzaburo Oe

You can't write novels about people who are timid, risk-averse and passive. Or you can, but they're called literary novels. — Ken Follett

He couldn't escape it. She'd begun re-calibrating his senses the moment she came through that library door. His peripheral vision was now trained for flashes of golden hair: his ears, trained for her melodic laugh. He found himself following the drifting scent of her soap and dusting powder, like a dog panting after the butcher's wife. — Tessa Dare

I think long and carefully about what novels ought to do. They should clarify the roles that have become obscured; they ought to identify those things in the past that are useful and those things that are not; and they ought to give nourishment. — Toni Morrison

I don't see myself as a very important person. But I was the second woman to write a novel in Iran, and I have written most of the novels about Iranian women. In this way, maybe I have a good place in Iranian literature. — Shahrnush Parsipur

All the episodes from my stories and novels are not about food only, but about meals. You can eat food by yourself. A meal, according to my understanding anyhow, is a communal event, bringing together family members, neighbors, even strangers. At its most ordinary, it involves hospitality, giving, receiving, and gratitude. — Wendell Berry

And thinking about this, which I have done so much, I discover that I come around, by a back door, to another of the things that obsess me. I mean, of course, this question of 'personality'. Heaven knows we are never allowed to forget that the 'personality' doesn't exist any more. It's the theme of half the novels written, the theme of the sociologists and all the other -ologists. We're told so often that human personality has disintegrated into nothing under pressure of all our knowledge that I've even been believing it. — Doris Lessing

I collected speech from so called "Smart", "Genius" nation... the judge is going to be made from you...

...

Don't worry "Notes of A Dead Man Sequel" are going to be one damn long journey. — Deyth Banger

I can remember as a college student writing stories and novels, some of which ended up getting published and some that didn't. It was like my head was going to burst - there were so many things I wanted to write all at once. I had so many ideas, jammed up. It was like they just needed permission to come out. — Stephen King

If you study your own struggles, the struggles of others, even in movies or novels you'll see the root of all their suffering is always attachments — Yasmin Mogahed