Novel Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

Jane Austen

Vita Sackville-West

Giacomo Casanova

Edith Wharton

Alexis de Tocqueville

Helen Dunmore

Charles Reade

The person, be it gentleman or lady, who has not pleasure in a good novel must be intolerably stupid

I have never known a novel that was good enough to be good in spite of its being adapted to the author's political views.

Writing a novel is not merely going on a shopping expedition across the border to an unreal land: it is hours and years spent in the factories, the streets, the cathedrals of the imagination.

For I've read in many a novel that, unless they've souls that grovel,
Folks prefer in fact a hovel to your dreary marble halls.

Charles Stuart Calverley

I don't care for philosophers in books. They are always bores. A novel should be an experience and convey an emotional truth rather than arguments.

An ancient author tells us somewhere, with the tone of a pedagogue, if you have not done anything worthy of being recorded, at least write something worthy of being read. It is a precept as beautiful as a diamond of the first water cut in England, but it cannot be applied to me, because I have not written either a novel, or the life of an illustrious character. Worthy or not, my life is my subject, and my subject is my life. I have lived without dreaming that I should ever take a fancy to write the history of my life, and, for that very reason, my Memoirs may claim from the reader an interest and a sympathy which they would not have obtained, had I always entertained the design to write them in my old age, and, still more, to publish them.

Giacomo Casanova

Art must take reality by surprise. It takes those moments which are for us merely a moment, plus a moment, plus another moment, and arbitrarily transforms them into a special series of moments held together by a major emotion. Art should not, it seems to me, pose the real as a preoccupation. Nothing is more unreal than certain so-called realist novels — they're nightmares. It is possible to achieve in a novel a certain sensory truth — the true feeling of a character — that is all.

Françoise Sagan

In course of time my first novel appeared. It was a love story.

George Barr McCutcheon

The really great novel tends to be the exact negative of its author's life. "The characters crowd onto the page", writes Mauriac, "there to accomplish all those things which the personal destiny of the author has kept at bay.

However novel it may appear, I shall venture the assertion that until women assume the place in society which good sense and good feeling alike assign to them, human improvement must advance but feebly. It is in vain that we would circumscribe the power of one half of our race, and that half by far the most important and influential. If they exert it not for good they will for evil, if they advance not knowledge they will perpetuate ignorance. Let women stand where they may in the scale of improvement, their position decides that of the race.

The first sentence of every novel should be: 'Trust me, this will take time but there is order here, very faint, very human.' Meander if you want to get to town.

Michael Ondaatje

A novel, in the end, is a container, a shape which you are trying to pour your story into.

The ordinariness of living to be old is too novel a thing to appreciate.

This is not a novel to be tossed aside lightly. It should be thrown with great force.

In a revolution, as in a novel, the most difficult part to invent is the end.

Alexis de Tocqueville

The beginnings and endings of all human undertakings are untidy, the building of a house, the writing of a novel, the demolition of a bridge, and, eminently, the finish of a voyage.

John Galsworthy

No matter how ephemeral it is, a novel is something, while despair is nothing.

Mario Vargas Llosa

Among the many problems which beset the novelist, not the least weighty is the choice of the moment at which to begin his novel.

Vita Sackville-West

At a certain point my novels set. They set just as hard as that jam jar. And then I know they are finished.

Ivy Compton-Burnett

A certain critic—for such men, I regret to say, do exist—made the nasty remark about my last novel that it contained 'all the old Wodehouse characters under different names'. He has probably now been eaten by bears, like the children who made mock of the prophet Elisha: but if he still survives he will not be able to make a similar charge against Summer Lightning. With my superior intelligence, I have outgeneralled this man by putting in all the old Wodehouse characters under the same names. Pretty silly it will make him feel, I rather fancy.

P. G. Wodehouse

A novel is like a gland pill - it nips off the cream of my hysterics and gets them running on track in a book where they belong instead of rioting all over my person.

Writing novels preserves you in a state of innocence — a lot passes you by — simply because your attention is otherwise diverted.

We live in a world ruled by fictions of every kind — mass merchandising, advertising, politics conducted as a branch of advertising, the instant translation of science and technology into popular imagery, the increasing blurring and intermingling of identities within the realm of consumer goods, the preempting of any free or original imaginative response to experience by the television screen. We live inside an enormous novel. For the writer in particular it is less and less necessary for him to invent the fictional content of his novel. The fiction is already there. The writer's task is to invent the reality.

I cringe when critics say I'm a master of the popular novel. What's an unpopular novel?

A fact is a simple statement that everyone believes. It is innocent, unless found guilty. A hypothesis is a novel suggestion that no one wants to believe. It is guilty, until found effective.