Novels Quotes

“A short story is a love affair, a novel is a marriage. A short story is a photograph; a novel is a film.”
― Lorrie Moore

“It is only a novel... or, in short, only some work in which the greatest powers of the mind are displayed, in which the most thorough knowledge of human nature, the happiest delineation of its varieties, the liveliest effusions of wit and humour, are conveyed to the world in the best-chosen language”
― Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey

“Romance novels are birthday cake and life is often peanut butter and jelly. I think everyone should have lots of delicious romance novels lying around for those times when the peanut butter of life gets stuck to the roof of your mouth.”
― Janet Evanovich

“No one says a novel has to be one thing. It can be anything it wants to be, a vaudeville show, the six o’clock news, the mumblings of wild men saddled by demons.”
― Ishmael Reed, Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down

“Writing a novel is a terrible experience, during which the hair often falls out and the teeth decay. I'm always irritated by people who imply that writing fiction is an escape from reality. It is a plunge into reality and it's very shocking to the system.”
― Flannery O'Connor, Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose

“People wonder why the novel is the most popular form of literature; people wonder why it is read more than books of science or books of metaphysics. The reason is very simple; it is merely that the novel is more true than they are.”
― G.K. Chesterton

“Writers remember everything...especially the hurts. Strip a writer to the buff, point to the scars, and he'll tell you the story of each small one. From the big ones you get novels. A little talent is a nice thing to have if you want to be a writer, but the only real requirement is the ability to remember the story of every scar.
Art consists of the persistence of memory.”
― Stephen King, Misery

“Writing fiction is the act of weaving a series of lies to arrive at a greater truth.”
― Khaled Hosseini

“The moon will guide you through the night with her brightness, but she will always dwell in the darkness, in order to be seen.”
― Shannon L. Alder

“The stupidity of people comes from having an answer for everything. The wisdom of the novel comes from having a question for everything. When Don Quixote went out into the world, that world turned into a mystery before his eyes. That is the legacy of the first European novel to the entire subsequent history of the novel. The novelist teaches the reader to comprehend the world as a question. There is wisdom and tolerance in that attitude. In a world built on sacrosanct certainties the novel is dead. The totalitarian world, whether founded on Marx, Islam, or anything else, is a world of answers rather than questions. There, the novel has no place.”
― Milan Kundera, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting

“One of the most important things you can do on this earth is to let people know they are not alone.”
― Shannon L. Alder

“Find the things that matter, and hold on to them, and fight for them, and refuse to let them go.”
― Lauren Oliver, Delirium

“I like shape very much. A novel has to have shape, and life doesn't have any. ”
― Jean Rhys, Smile Please: An Unfinished Autobiography

“You don't read Gatsby, I said, to learn whether adultery is good or bad but to learn about how complicated issues such as adultery and fidelity and marriage are. A great novel heightens your senses and sensitivity to the complexities of life and of individuals, and prevents you from the self-righteousness that sees morality in fixed formulas about good and evil.”
― Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books

“There is no end
To what a living world
Will demand of you.”
― Octavia E. Butler, Parable of the Sower

“I write to find strength.
I write to become the person that hides inside me.
I write to light the way through the darkness for others.
I write to be seen and heard.
I write to be near those I love.
I write by accident, promptings, purposefully and anywhere there is paper.
I write because my heart speaks a different language that someone needs to hear.
I write past the embarrassment of exposure.
I write because hypocrisy doesn’t need answers, rather it needs questions to heal.
I write myself out of nightmares.
I write because I am nostalgic, romantic and demand happy endings.
I write to remember.
I write knowing conversations don’t always take place.
I write because speaking can’t be reread.
I write to sooth a mind that races.
I write because you can play on the page like a child left alone in the sand.
I write because my emotions belong to the moon; high tide, low tide.
I write knowing I will fall on my words, but no one will say it was for very long.
I write because I want to paint the world the way I see love should be.
I write to provide a legacy.
I write to make sense out of senselessness.
I write knowing I will be killed by my own words, stabbed by critics, crucified by both misunderstanding and understanding.
I write for the haters, the lovers, the lonely, the brokenhearted and the dreamers.
I write because one day someone will tell me that my emotions were not a waste of time.
I write because God loves stories.
I write because one day I will be gone, but what I believed and felt will live on.”
― Shannon L. Alder

“I have come to understand something about novels," Tessa said.
"And what is that?"
"They are not true.”
― Cassandra Clare, Clockwork Princess

“I often find that a novel, even a well-written and compelling novel, can become a blur to me soon after I've finished reading it. I recollect perfectly the feeling of reading it, the mood I occupied, but I am less sure about the narrative details. It is almost as if the book were, as Wittgenstein said of his propositions, a ladder to be climbed and then discarded after it has served its purpose.”
― Sven Birkerts, The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age

“Some stories have to be written because no one would believe the absurdity of it all.”
― Shannon L. Alder

“Up until then, whenever anyone had mentioned the possibility of making a film adaptation, my answer had always been, ‘No, I’m not interested.’ I believe that each reader creates his own film inside his head, gives faces to the characters, constructs every scene, hears the voices, smells the smells. And that is why, whenever a reader goes to see a film based on a novel that he likes, he leaves feeling disappointed, saying: ‘the book is so much better than the film.”
― Paulo Coelho, The Zahir

“Life must not be a novel that is given to us, but one that is made by us. ”
― Novalis, Philosophical Writings

“In writing a novel, when in doubt, have two guys come through the door with guns.”
― Raymond Chandler

“Life is painful and disappointing. It is useless, therefore, to write new realistic novels. We generally know where we stand in relation to reality and don’t care to know any more.”
― Michel Houellebecq, H.P. Lovecraft: Against the World, Against Life

“If you only write when inspired, you may be a fairly decent poet, but you'll never be a novelist.”
― Neil Gaiman

“Poetry, plays, novels, music, they are the cry of the human spirit trying to understand itself and make sense of our world.”
― Laura Malone Elliott, Annie, Between the States

“Marriage is a partnership, not a democracy.”
― Nicholas Sparks, The Best of Me

“When I want to read a novel, I write one.”
― Benjamin Disraeli

“The first sentence of every novel should be: Trust me, this will take time but there is order here, very faint, very human.”
― Michael Ondaatje, In the Skin of a Lion

“If there was any great lesson in life it was this: No battle was ever won with silence.”
― Shannon L. Alder

“It took me a moment to speak. My heart pumped madly as though I’d run for miles in pursuit of something vital. In this case, love.”
― J.J. Sorel, A Taste of Peace