Authors
Topics
Lists
Pictures
Resources
Novel Quotes
500+ Sourced quotes
Source
Report...
Gordon eyed them with inert hatred. At this moment he hated all books, and novels most of all. Horrible to think of all that soggy, half-baked trash massed together in one place.
George Orwell
Source
Report...
Anywhere in New York, anywhere in the country, somewhere there's going to be a Coke sign. People identify with Coke. You can write a novel about New York and people from the country will read it if they feel that you've made them familiar with New York.
Stephen King
Source
Report...
St. Paul introduced an entirely novel view of marriage, that it existed primarily to prevent the sin of fornication. It is just as if one were to maintain that the sole reason for baking bread is to prevent people from stealing cake.
Bertrand Russell
Source
Report...
To read a novel is a difficult and complex art. You must be capable not only of great fineness of perception, but of great boldness of imagination.
Virginia Woolf
Source
Report...
The atmosphere of orthodoxy is always damaging to prose, and above all it is completely ruinous to the novel, the most anarchical of all forms of literature.
George Orwell
Source
Report...
Conversation should be pleasant without scurrility, witty without affectation, free without indecency, learned without conceitedness, novel without falsehood.
William Shakespeare
Source
Report...
Novels arise out of the shortcomings of history.
Novalis
Source
Report...
A surprising number [of novels] have been read aloud to me, and I like all if moderately good, and if they do not end unhappily—against which a law ought to be passed.
Charles Darwin
Source
Report...
The solution, once revealed, must seem to have been inevitable. At least half of all the mystery novels published violate this law.
Raymond Chandler
Source
Report...
Entering a novel is like going on a climb in the mountains: You have to learn the rhythms of respiration - acquire the pace. Otherwise you stop right away.
Umberto Eco
Source
Report...
And that which yesterday was the novel opinion of one man, to-day becomes the general opinion of the majority.
Leo Tolstoy
Source
Report...
Until that moment I had not understood that this was a story about lonely people, about absence and loss, and that that was why I had taken refuge in it until it became confused with my own life, like someone who has escaped into the pages of a novel because those whom he needs to love seem nothing more than ghosts inhabiting the mind of a stranger.
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
Source
Report...
He wanted to appear suddenly to her in novel and heroic colors. He wanted to stir her from that casualness she showed toward everything except herself.
F. Scott Fitzgerald
Source
Report...
Online births and deaths in Facebook Nation made me question why people could not live without borders. Birthright citizenship is like being baptized into a religion as an infant. Taking a page from Veronica Roth's novel Divergent, people should be free to choose where they belong when they grow up.
Newton Lee
Source
Report...
We wish to suggest a structure for the salt of deoxyribose nucleic acid (DNA). This structure has novel features which are of considerable biological interest.
Francis Crick
Source
Report...
I'll never write another novel on an electric typewriter. I'd rather use a sharp stick and a little pile of dogshit.
Tom Robbins
Source
Report...
Childhood lays itself out, like a novel, he suggests, complete with central observer, fixed characters, and linear plot. Later, life disperses itself into anecdotes. At twenty-one, it no longer strictly matters whether the author went first to Ireland and then to Spain, or Spain first. And after thirty, he could stitch the pages in backward for all we care.
Wilfrid Sheed
Source
Report...
A novel takes the courage of a marathon runner, and as long as you have to run, you might as well be a winning marathon runner. Serendipity and blind faith faith in yourself won't hurt a thing. All the bastards in the world will snicker and sneer because they haven't the talent to zip up their flies by themselves. To hell with them, particularly the critics. Stand in there, son, no matter how badly you are battered and hurt.
Leon Uris
Source
Report...
I have retired to Nemours to work upon a novel called The Age for Love, and it is on this subject that I wished to consult you, my dear master.
Paul Bourget
Source
Report...
Yes – oh dear yes – the novel tells a story.
E. M. Forster
Source
Report...
I've made my best notes sitting outside cafes on busy streets, or in murky bars in foreign cities. I sorted out a big series of problems in the novel I'm just finishing while sitting drinking a long line of solitary beers in a bar in a small coastal town. The hangover was pretty brutal, but I'm not sure I'd have found the solutions any other way. Part of the job of being a writer is learning how your head works - when to push it, when to step back. This kind of self-management is actually far harder, I think, than learning how to write decent prose.
Michael Marshall Smith
Source
Report...
Very little comes easily to our poor, benighted species (the first creature, after all, to experiment with the novel evolutionary inventions of self-conscious philosophy and art). Even the most obvious, accurate, and natural style of thinking or drawing must be regulated by history and won by struggle. Solutions must therefore arise within a social context and record the complex interactions of mind and environment that define the possibility of human improvement.
Stephen Jay Gould
Source
Report...
Reading is a private act, private even from the person who wrote the book. Once the novel is out there, the author is beside the point. The reader and the book have their own relationship now, and should be left alone to work things out for themselves.
Ann Patchett
Source
Report...
It must essentially remain a novel of adolescence written by a retarded adolescent.
John Fowles
Source
Report...
What struck me more than the book's UFO stories, however, was the common thread weaving among them of breathtaking alterations in consciousness associated with the experiences — sensations of leaving the body, of flying through the air or being "carried along by the wind," and receiving "startling and novel insights into the nature of reality" that reverberated thereafter with profound, life-changing effects.
Susan M. Watkins
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
...
20
Quote of the day
Time and trouble will tame an advanced young woman, but an advanced old woman is uncontrollable by any earthly force.
Dorothy L. Sayers
Featured Authors
Lists
Predictions that didn't happen
If it's on the Internet it must be true
Remarkable Last Words (or Near-Last Words)
Picture Quotes
Confucius
Philip James Bailey
Eleanor Roosevelt
Letitia Elizabeth Landon
Popular Topics
life
love
nature
time
god
power
human
mind
work
art
heart
thought
men
day
×
Lib Quotes