Novel Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

That was asking a lot of my readers, I realized, but I was trying to write the novel I would most enjoy decoding.

Paul Di Filippo

The best picture has not yet been painted; the greatest poem is still unsung; the mightiest novel remains to be written; the divinest music has not been conceived, even by Bach. In science, probably ninety-nine percent of the knowable has not yet been discovered.

Lincoln Steffens

A new opinion counts as true just in proportion as it gratifies the individual's desire to assimilate the novel in his experience to his beliefs in stock

No romantic novel ever written in America, by man or woman, is one half so beautiful as My Ántonia.

He who discovers a fact or makes known a new law or adds a novel beauty to truth in any way makes everyone of us his debtor. How beautiful upon the highway are the feet of him who comes bringing in his hands the gift of a new truth to mankind.

We must remember that there's more than one story and plot in every novel. There are at least as many stories as there are main characters, and each of these stories has to have multiple plots to keep it going - blood and bone, nerve and tissue, forgotten longing and unknown events.

Anyone who had ever read a novel knew that governesses were supposed to be meek and downtrodden.

A novel is what you call something that won't sell if you call it poems or short stories.

It is curious for one who studies the action and reaction of national literature on each other, to see the humor of Swift and Sterne and Fielding, after filtering through Richter, reappear in Carlyle with a tinge of Germanism that makes it novel, alien, or even displeasing, as the case may be, to the English mind.

James Russell Lowell

My first novel is loaded with food references largely because my cupboards were bare, and I was writing hungry.

Strangely enough, the first character in Fried Green Tomatoes was the cafe, and the town. I think a place can be as much a character in a novel as the people.

Through their capacity to manipulate symbols and to engage in reflective thought, people can generate novel ideas and innovative actions that transcend their past experiences

When a writer calls his work a Romance, it need hardly be observed that he wishes to claim a certain latitude, both as to its fashion and material, which he would not have felt himself entitled to assume had he professed to be writing a Novel.

Nathaniel Hawthorne

Sometimes, as in a great novel, you cannot see until you get to the end that God was leaving clues for you all along.

In Finnish they have no he or she words. If you're writing a novel in Finnish, you have to make gender very obvious early on, either by naming the character or by describing a sex-specific activity.

Margaret Atwood

Getting into a new field of physics is like reading a Russian novel. There are a lot of names to cope with, and at first you wonder who's who.

Kenneth W. Ford

When I am writing fiction, I believe I am much better organized, more methodical - one has to be when writing a novel. Writing poetry is a state of free float.

Margaret Atwood

The new novel is sought more eagerly, and devoured more greedily, the New Testament.

Art, at any rate in a novel, must be indissolubly linked with craft...

Elizabeth Bowen

I never think about issues when I'm working on a novel. Issues are things that happen to people in sufficient numbers to elicit widespread attention; in other words, they're just life happening. That's what I think about: life, and telling a story.

I wanted my first novel to be a veritable infarct of narrative cloggers-the trick being to feel your way through each clog by blowing it up until its obstructiveness finally reveals not blank mass but unlooked-for seepage points of passage.

Nicholson Baker

I don't use women as means to an end: I do what the poet in your novel does — I use them only as objects of contemplation.

Gustave Flaubert

I would never condone the burning of a Dan Brown novel, much though I loathe and detest his work. Well, I say "work", you know, words, randomly arranged to form millions of dollars... I'm not bitter at all...

In a well worn metaphor, a parallel is drawn between the life of man and the metamorphosis of the caterpillar into the butterfly; but the comparison may be more just as well as more novel, if for its former term we take the mental progress of the race. History shows that the human mind, fed by constant accessions of knowledge, periodically grows too large for its theoretical coverings, and bursts them asunder to appear in new habiliments, as the feeding and growing grub, at intervals, casts its too narrow skin and assumes another, itself but temporary. Truly the imago state of Man seems to be terribly distant, but every moult is a step gained, and of such there have been many.

Thomas Henry Huxley

All publicity isn't good publicity. As a New York publicist put it: "What: the guy's an asshole so I'll go and buy his novel?"