Novel Quotes

I think politics is deadly to write about, frankly. If you have a political agenda and you set out to write a novel to prove that, say, capitalism should crumble, then it's going to be a really bad novel. Very few people have been able to deal with political fiction - Dickens, Dostoyevsky. But even Tolstoy got really tiresome when he was talking about the serfs. You have to let characters be characters, not [gruff voice] Mr Capitalism or [girlie voice] Miss Anti-Fur.

~ Donna Tartt

Ladies sheltering behind men, men sheltering behind servants - the whole system's wrong, and she must challenge it.

~ E.m. Forster

Taken together the Internet reads like the grandest character-driven novel humanity has ever known. Not much plot though.

~ Victor Lavalle

Socrates is flying. No, he is soaring. The wings behind him beat in a calming rhythm while the cool air rushes past. His wings are all that matter, snapping at the rushing wind like the sails of some great sea vessel, the feathery appendages all he is and all he will ever want to be.His back muscles flex with the effort that takes him high above the ground. He feels the effort, of course, but sweeping into the sky does not require much of one. The sensation is pleasurable, even exhilarating. With flight there is freedom beyond description, an ecstasy bordering on sexual.He has only one destination, and that is to soar higher, to no longer be a prisoner of the earth. Here destinations seem irrelevant, the world below small. Flying exceeds every pleasure he knows. In the immense forever of blue sky, all that matters is flight and his ability to climb higher.Up and up and up...

~ Kenneth C. Goldman

Writing a novel is easy… writing checks is hard.

~ Michael J. Kannengieser

I'm not a lawyer, but I play one in my novel COPYRIGHT. I also play a serial rapist, a drug addict, a teenage boy and lesbian model.

~ Lori Lesko

I like to think that when I complete a novel I learned something along the way.

~ Michael J. Kannengieser

Don’t be offended if you encounter some good-natured ribbing, the idea ofwriting a novel in a month deserves to be laughed at.

~ Chris Baty

The world is always full of the sound of waves.The little fishes, abandoning themselves to the waves, dance and sing, and play, but who knows the heart of the sea, a hundred feet down? Who knows it depth?

~ Eiji Yoshikawa

It takes skill to win a battle, but brains to win a war.

~ Amy I. Long

To live is to walk beside Death but never join hands. ~ Captain Buck Slackeye Roberts

~ Kai Mccarthy

Writing is the only way to run away from home, without ever leaving.

~ Shannon L. Alder

Escaping Reality One Erotic Romance Novel At a Time.

~ S.k. Logsdon

Shit, man, if you see a dog scratching at the dirt trying to dig something up, walk away real fast,” he said, then pulled a little square of paper from his pocket and swallowed whatever was folded inside.

~ Cole Alpaugh

The two smallest boys were cut down first, bodies bounding in different directions as they were shot from opposite sides of the field, like pinballs caught in a tight corner.

~ Cole Alpaugh

If professional religious leaders cannot instruct us in mythological lore, our artists and creative writers can perhaps step into this priestly role and bring fresh insight to our lost and damaged role.

~ Karen Armstrong

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

The warmth of our bodies began to melt my frozen heart bit by bit.

~ Kirito

Her friend glanced between Cait and Dante.“But Cait, The Hulk has requested my absence. I believe it best if I cooperate.

~ Abby Niles

Ninety percent of my work is crap,” he continued. “Another nine percent is mediocre, and then there are those rare gems that are actually useable.

~ Olivia Cunning

When you write a movie, you have a hundred collaborators. But when you write a novel, it's yours.

~ Sidney Sheldon

You taste injustice, even if it’s fictional, really taste it,it has a way of doing that. Sometimes, you can never put the shoe on the other foot. We can’t go back in time and know what it was like to be a black person then. Even today, when things are supposed to be so much better, not one of you can understand what it’s like to be black, to live with the knowledge of what happened to your ancestry and still face injustice. But that book makes us taste it and, reading it, we know how bitter that taste is and we know we don’t like it. But that bitter wakes you up, and when you wake up, you open your mind to things in this world, you make yourself think. Then you’ll decide you don’t like the taste of injustice, not for you and not for anyone, and you’ll understand that even though all the battles can’t be won, that doesn’t mean you won’t fight.

~ Kristen Ashley

Now, my novel begins. No, now I begin my novel—and yet I cannot decide whether to call myself I or she.

~ Elizabeth Hardwick

She didn’t think that by hanging a chandelier from the ceiling you made a room with a chandelier. She felt you’d made another world, which you could slip in and out of by some vague process of application

~ Guy Mankowski

Samuel walked out to Lindsey then, and there she was in his arms, my sweet butterball babe, born ten years after my fourteen years on Earth: Abigail Suzanne. Little Susie to me. Samuel placed Susie on a blanket near the flowers. And my sister, my Lindsey, left me in her memories, where I was meant to be.

~ Alice Sebold

Writing a novel is like trying to solve a jigsaw puzzle whose pieces aren't even fixed in shape. Yet, somehow, they all come together in the end to form the complete picture.

~ Jyoti Arora

I am a dash man and not a miler, and it is probable that I will never write a novel. So far the novels of this war have had too much of the strength, maturity and craftsmanship critics are looking for, and too little of the glorious imperfections which teeter and fall off the best minds. The men who have been in this war deserve some sort of trembling melody rendered without embarrassment or regret. I’ll watch for that book.

~ J.d. Salinger

Writing a novel is like traveling the universe on foot.

~ Dennis R. Miller

-I think you are inhuman. If I leave you, who will you go to? Would you find another lover?I said nothing.-Deny it,damn you!

~ Michael Ondaatje

A novel is just a story that hasn't yet discovered a way to be brief.

~ George Saunders

I went mad before he did, you killed everything in me. Kiss me,will you. Stop defending yourself.

~ Michael Ondaatje

Quote from A la bulgaro:So long time has passed since those days, and since that story, which is still vivid in my memory, and even more vivid than all the rest. Some times I stay alone in my work - room here, in my father's old mansion in Pasadena, and I look through the old, yellow pages again and again. Then I go back to the north part which is furnished in my style, with many colored Bulgarian carpets and blankets (special kind of Bulgarian blankets with long fur), I make my coffee in a cooper coffee - pot, which has been brought from there, and my thoughts wonder to those absurd memories of mine...Very often some friends ask me - what is that unusual memories of yours? I can't explain to them, better say I don't want to, and I always avoid the answer by saying - a la Bulgaro - in a Bulgarian way...Oh, yes, yes...

~ Alexandar Tomov

Half asleep, he wondered whether that might not have been his happiest day ever, the last, perfect day swelling with the immensity of his secret intent, secret creation—the day before everything changed—the day before he realized, for the first time, yet with absolute finality, just how small his private immensity really was when measured against that other vast, dark, impersonal immensity, call it God, or history, or simply life.

~ Olga Grushin

We were afraid of so many things: Of our children, who lived in their own world of casually lurid pleasures, zombies and cartoon killers and thuggish music. Of our neighbors, who were buying gold and ammunition and great quantities of freeze-dried food, and who were organizing themselves into angry tribes recognizable to one another by bumper stickers.

~ Jean Thompson

Life is a great novel, discovering your calling is the far better sequel

~ Carl Henegan

Most times, my mind is just an ongoing, present-tense, first-person monologue. It's like I'm writing a novel, constantly, but only in my brain.

~ Andrew Shaffer

Most times, my mind is just an ongoing, present-tense, first-person monologue. It's like I'm writing a novel.

~ Andrew Shaffer

The dominant primordial beast was strong in Buck

~ Jack London

If the US is a human melting pot, then Eastern Europe is a scrap yard.

~ Péter Zilahy

«She had Google, and she had Wikipedia. She could look up anything obscure, any words or phrases that she didn’t understand. A romance novel was just a book, while the Internet was the Internet. The Internet would crack these nuts for sure.»

~ Bruce Sterling