Novels Quotes

Of what earthly use were novels? How did they help anybody?

~ Damon Galgut

Everybody loves to hate a sinner, reading stories about them makes people feel better about themselves.

~ Tycobbsteeth

Nonfiction at its best is like fashioning a cabinet. It can never be a sculpture. It can be elegant and very beautiful, but it can never be sculpture. Captive to facts - or predetermined form - it cannot fly.

~ Peter Matthiessen

I gain nothing but pleasure from writing fiction; short stories are foreplay, novellas are heavy petting – but novels are the full monte. Frankly, if I didn't enjoy writing novels I wouldn't do it – the world hardly needs any more and I can think of numerous more useful things someone with my skills could be engaged in. As it is, the immersion in parallel but believable worlds satisfies all my demands for vicarious experience, voyeurism and philosophic calithenics. I even enjoy the mechanics of writing, the dull timpani of the typewriter keys, the making of notes – many notes – and most seducttive of all: the buying of stationery. That the transmogrification of my beautiful thoughts into a grossly imperfect prose is always the end result doesn't faze me: all novels are only a version- there is no Platonic ideal. But I'd go further still: fiction is my way of thinking about and relating to the world; if I don't write I'm not engaged in any praxis, and lose all purchase.

~ Will Self

Don't go chasing after the grand theme, the idea, I told my students, as if it is separate from the story itself. The idea or ideas behind the story must come to you through the experience of the novel and not as something tacked onto it.

~ Azar Nafisi

I believe, Sebastian, that novels are more important than ever. They are more important than video recorders and record players and television because they enable us to exercise our minds. They allow us to step back and see where the history is taking us.

~ Imraan Coovadia

Cecy, I do think it is unfair. People in novels are fainting all the time, and I never can, no matter how badly I need to.

~ Patricia C. Wrede

I don't like novels that end happily. They depress me so much.

~ Oscar Wilde

Do you want to know how to write novels? I’ll tell you the secret: start on page one and keep going, in order, until you come to the last page. Then stop.

~ Pasi Ilmari Jääskeläinen

The best plot twists are the ones you didn't expect.

~ Shannon L. Alder

If I would have known I was going to leave my job that day to become a writer, I probably would have planned differently... It didn't come by way of illness per se, accident, or dismissal, but by way of sheer self-mutiny. The self I was born to be, decided to hijack the one I had created.

~ Dawn Kohler

The battles may last for a long time, perhaps even years. There are powerful forces on both sides, and the war is important to both armies. It's not a battle of good against evil. It's a war between forces that are fighting for the balance of power, and, when that type of battle begins, it lasts longer than others-because Allah is on both sides.

~ Paulo Coelho

When I imagine changing places with her I get the feeling I do on finishing a novel with a brick-wall happy ending---I mean the kind of ending when you never think any more about the characters.

~ Dodie Smith

Only Those Who Take Risk, Succeed!

~ Latif Mercado

On the morning after the daring theft of a priceless James Ensor painting from the Grand Palais in Paris, I was allowed to leave the Les Halles Police Station after only a few hours of questioning.

~ Mark Zero

Her face was as red as her hair. “What are you doing,” she cried. Devon put a question mark next to the sentence. “Editing your paper.” What did it look like he was doing?“You’re just cutting out stuff!”“What do you think editing is?

~ M.m. John

Like the roller coaster of life...novels aren't fun without ups and downs and even an occasional loop.

~ Carmen Desousa

Novels arise out of the shortcomings of history.

~ Novalis

In this place called Hell novels are written by people who don't read books.

~ Andy Seven

Novels arise out of the shortcoings of history.

~ Novalis

Short stories are often treated as the poor cousins of novels.

~ Christopher Bram

Now and then I am asked as to ‘what books a statesman should read,’ and my answer is, poetry and novels – including short stories under the head of novels.

~ Theodore Roosevelt

Life is'nt about getting everything you want the instant you want it.Some thing are worth waiting for.

~ Mira Lyn Kelly

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

~ John Irving

A Dickens character to me is a theatrical projection of a character. Not that it isn't real. It's real, but in that removed sense. But Sherlock Holmes is simply there. I would be astonished if I went to 221 1/2 B Baker Street and didn't find

~ Rex Stout

They (the novelists) became the voice of the citizen against the ubiquitous raison d'état, which reappeared endlessly to justify everything from unjust laws and the use of child labour to incompetent generalship and inhuman conditions on warships.The themes they popularized have gradually turned into the laws which, for all their flaws, have improved the state of man.

~ John Ralston Saul

Well, Mr Thomas, while I'm in favour of education, I couldn't in good conscience recommend a university career in anything but the hard sciences. As a working environment, the rest of academia is a sewer of irrationality, hate mongering, envy, and self-interest. I'm getting out the moment I earn my twenty-five-year pension package, and then I'm going to write novels...

~ Dean Koontz

Novels include padding; I think padding may be an essential part of the novel, for all I know.

~ Jorge Luis Borges

We did photograph albums, best dresses, favourite novels, and once someone's own novel. It was about a week in a telephone box with a pair of pyjamas called Adolf Hitler. The heroine was a piece of string with a knot in it.

~ Jeanette Winterson

Everything that ever happened to me that was important happened in the desert.

~ Michael Ondaatje

I think novelists are in the education business, really, but they're not teaching you times tables, they are teaching you responsiveness and morality and to make nuanced judgments. And really to just make the planet look a bit richer when you go out into the street.

~ Martin Amis

Because we want to know things, how the pieces fit. Talkers seduce, words direct us into corners. We want more than anything to grow and change. Brave new world.

~ Michael Ondaatje

Every serious novel is, beyond its immediate thematic preoccupations, a discussion of the craft, a conquest of the form, a conflict with its difficulties and a pursuit of its felicities and beauty.

~ Ralph Ellison

A mysterious ability, a broken promise, a life changed forever...

~ Kim Hornsby

...you mean you don't fit characters into a plot? excatly...

~ John Geddes