Historical novels are, without question, the best way of teaching history, for they offer the human stories behind the events and leave the reader with a desire to know more. — Louis L'Amour
All great novels, all true novels, are bisexual. — Milan Kundera
Novels aren’t just happy escapes; they are slivers of people’s souls, nailed to the pages, dripping ink from veins of wood pulp. Reading the right one at the right time can make all the difference. — Brandon Sanderson
Novels as dull as dishwater, with the grease of random sentiments floating on top. — Italo Calvino
Fiction is a branch of neurology: the scenarios of nerve and blood vessels are the written mythologies of memory and desire. — J. G. Ballard
The best fiction is far more true than any journalism. — William Faulkner
The secret of successful fiction is a continual slight novelty. — Edmund Gosse
Fiction writing is great. You can make up almost anything. — Ivana Trump
Fiction reveals truths that reality obscures. — Jessamyn West
It's with bad sentiments that one makes good novels. — Aldous Huxley
The problem with fiction, it has to be plausible. That's not true with non-fiction. — Tom Wolfe
The novel is not so much a literary genre, but a literary space, like a sea that is filled by many rivers. — Jose Saramago
The novel wins by points, the short story by knockout. — Julio Cortazar
Reading was like a drug, a dope. The novels created moods in which I lived for days. — Richard Wright
Fiction Book Quotes
I say, 'If I had a serious brain injury I might well write a children's book', but otherwise the idea of being conscious of who you're directing the story to is anathema to me, because, in my view, fiction is freedom and any restraints on that are intolerable. — Martin Amis
I'm working on a nonfiction book on Nepal and a novel about diasporas. — Louise Brown
There are relatively few science fiction or fantasy books with the main character being an old person. — Elizabeth Moon
Fiction is the truth inside the lie.
Expand the definition of 'reading' to include non-fiction, humor, graphic novels, magazines, action adventure, and, yes, even websites. It's the pleasure of reading that counts; the focus will naturally broaden. A boy won't read shark books forever. — Jon Scieszka
A stage play requires very different craft from a book, fiction or otherwise, and ditto from a screenplay. — Dirk Benedict
Gayness is built into Batman. I'm not using gay in the pejorative sense, but Batman is very, very gay. There's just no denying it. Obviously as a fictional character he's intended to be heterosexual, but the basis of the whole concept is utterly gay. — Sayings
A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.
Reading fiction not only develops our imagination and creativity, it gives us the skills to be alone. It gives us the ability to feel empathy for people we've never met, living lives we couldn't possibly experience for ourselves, because the book puts us inside the character's skin. — Ann Patchett
I love fiction because in fiction you go into the thoughts of people, the little people, the people who were defeated, the poor, the women, the children that are never in history books. — Isabel Allende
No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader. — Ernest Hemingway
Without books we're a very uneducated society. Think of the places books have taken us, the people we've been introduced to (fiction or non-fiction) and how books have allowed us to broaden our vocabulary. — Tom Robinson
Fiction Quotes
Better to have a small role in God's story than to cast yourself as the lead in your own fiction. — LeCrae
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists. — Hannah Arendt
If you have to write a fictional adventure to convey a philosophy of evil, the best person is the destroyer of evil himself, Lord Shiva. — Amish Tripathi
It's no wonder that truth is stranger than fiction. Fiction has to make sense. — Mark Twain
I am no longer going to become a fictional character to please people. That's too much work. — Lauryn Hill
The universe wrote fiction is us. Its called Fear.
The gospel is fiction when judged by the empire, but the empire is fiction when judged by the gospel. — Walter Brueggemann
The fiction of Ayn Rand is as low as you can get re fiction. I hope you picked it up off the floor of the subway and threw it in the nearest garbage pail. She makes Mickey Spillane look like Dostoevsky. — Flannery O'Connor
What might sound like science fiction elsewhere in the world at DARPA was future science. — Annie Jacobsen
You don't get rich writing science fiction. If you want to get rich, you start a religion. — L. Ron Hubbard
Fiction Stories Quotes
The world is full of fictional characters looking for their stories — Diane Arbus
Crime fiction makes money. It may be harder for writers to get published, but crime is doing better than most of what we like to call CanLit. It's elementary, plot-driven, character-rich story-telling at its best. — Linwood Barclay
Reflecting on these complex relationships between reader and story, fiction and life, can constitute a form of therapy against the sleep of reason, which generates monsters. — Umberto Eco
I could write historical fiction, or science fiction, or a mystery but since I find it fascinating to research the clues of some little know period and develop a story based on that, I will probably continue to do it. — Jean M. Auel
A good science fiction story should be able to predict not the automobile but the traffic jam. — Frederik Pohl
It's a damn good story. If you have any comments, write them on the back of a check. — Erle Stanley Gardner
Short fiction seems more targeted - hand grenades of ideas, if you will. When they work, they hit, they explode, and you never forget them. Long fiction feels more like atmosphere: it's a lot smokier and less defined. — Paolo Bacigalupi
Babylon 5 is probably the biggest, most ambitious television science fiction series ever made. It's one big novel told over five years with 110 different stories told within it. — Bill Mumy
The reason 99% of all stories written are not bought by editors is very simple. Editors never buy manuscripts that are left on the closet shelf at home. — John Y. Campbell
My own experience is that once a story has been written, one has to cross out the beginning and the end. It is there that we authors do most of our lying. — Anton Chekhov
Fantasy Novels Quotes
Oh, I’m nerdy about science fiction and fantasy and graphic novels and reading, and I’m nerdy about board games. My favorite board game is a board game I’m working on right now. It’s a game of Napoleonic era naval warfare, and it’s going to be fun. — Billy Campbell
I never think about genre when I work. I've written fantasy, science fiction, supernatural fiction, and am now working on a suspense novel. Genres are mostly useful as a marketing tool, and to help booksellers known where to shelve a book. — Elizabeth Hand
I've come across a novel called The Palm-Wine Drinkard, by the Nigerian writer Amos Tutuola, that is really remarkable because it is a kind of fantasy of West African mythology all told in West African English which, of course, is not the same as standard English. — William Golding
Children are dying." Lull nodded. "That's a succinct summary of humankind, I'd say. Who needs tomes and volumes of history? Children are dying. The injustices of the world hide in those three words. — Steven Erikson
I believe that I have now experienced the lifetime maximum exposure to bottom spanking in fantasy novels. — James Nicoll
I'm not constrained by being a genre writer. Any story I can imagine, I can cast as a fantasy novel and probably get it published. — Lynn Abbey
Heaven knows, I've exposed myself in my novels through the use of fantasy and imagination... now my new book is about what really happened to me... not my heroines. — Judith Krantz
Mervyn Peake is a finer poet than Edgar Allan Poe, and he is therefore able to maintain his world of fantasy brilliantly through three novels. It (Gormenghast trilogy) is a very, very great work ... a classic of our age. — Mervyn Peake
Im a geek - I read fantasy novels, I play World of Warcraft, Im a massive gamer, I have Star Trek outfits. — Robert Kazinsky
When 'Midnight's Children' came out, people in the West tended to respond to the fantasy elements in the novel, to praise it in those terms. In India, people read it like a history book. — Salman Rushdie
Reading Fiction Quotes
Beyond that, I seem to be compelled to write science fiction, rather than fantasy or mysteries or some other genre more likely to climb onto bestseller lists even though I enjoy reading a wide variety of literature, both fiction and nonfiction. — Joan D. Vinge
All readers come to fiction as willing accomplices to your lies. Such is the basic goodwill contract made the moment we pick up a work of fiction. — Steve Almond
Simply put, Redeeming Love is the most powerful work of fiction you will ever read. — Liz Curtis Higgs
As a child, I read science fiction, but from the very beginnings of my reading for pleasure, I read a lot of non-fictional history, particularly historical biography. — Norman Spinrad
It is perfectly okay to write garbage – as long as you edit brilliantly. — C. J. Cherryh
I learned to write fiction the way I learned to read fiction - by skipping the parts that bored me. — Jonathan Lethem
Everybody else is working to change, persuade, tempt and control them. The best readers come to fiction to be free of all that noise. — Philip Roth
I have found, in short, from reading my own writing, that my subject in fiction is the action of grace in territory largely held by the devil. — Flannery O'Connor
I read recipes the same way I read science fiction. I get to the end and say to myself "well, that's not going to happen — Rita Rudner
Geisha because when I was living in Japan, I met a fellow whose mother was a geisha, and I thought that was kind of fascinating and ended up reading about the subject just about the same time I was getting interested in writing fiction. — Arthur Golden
Mystery Novels Quotes
At least half the mystery novels published violate the law that the solution, once revealed, must seem to be inevitable. — Raymond Chandler
After immersing myself in the mysteries of the Electoral College for a novel I wrote in the '90s, I came away believing that the case for scrapping it is less obvious than I originally thought. — Jeff Greenfield
If I had a bookstore I would make all the mystery novels hard to find. — Demetri Martin
Every movie is a road movie. Every novel is a mystery. Every tortilla chip is sacred. — Sherman Alexie
Detective stories keep alive a view of the world which ought to be true. Of course people read them for fun ... But underneath they feed a hunger for justice ... you offer to divert them, and you show them by stealth the orderly world in which we should all try to be living. — Dorothy L. Sayers
I had never known the pleasure of reading, of exploring the recesses of the soul, of letting myself be carried away by imagination, beauty, and the mystery of fiction and language. For me all those things were born with that novel. — Carlos Ruiz Zafon
There are some varieties of fiction that I never touch - mystery stories, for instance, which I abhor, and historical novels. I also detest the so-called "powerful" novel - full of commonplace obscenities and torrents of dialog. — Vladimir Nabokov
When I am thickening my plots, I like to think 'What if ... What if ... ' Thus my imagination can move from the likely, which everyone can think of, to the unlikely-but-possible, my preferred plot. — Patricia Highsmith
Ah, there's nothing like tea in the afternoon. When the British Empire collapses, historians will find that it had made but two invaluable contributions to civilization - this tea ritual and the detective novel. — Ayn Rand
Adrianne Harun's dark, mysterious novel is by turns Gothic and grittily realistic, astute and poetic in its evocation of evil everywhere. — Andrea Barrett
Science Fiction Quotes
The science fiction method is dissection and reconstruction. — Frederik Pohl
20 years ago, all of this [artificial intelligence] was science fiction. 10 years ago, it was a dream. Today, we are living it. — Jensen Huang
Science fiction readers probably have the gene for novelty, and seem to enjoy a cascade of invention as much as a writer enjoys providing one. — Walter Jon Williams
The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few. — Leonard Nimoy
My experience of life is that it is not divided up into genres; it’s a horrifying, romantic, tragic, comical, science-fiction cowboy detective novel. You know, with a bit of pornography if you're lucky. — Alan Moore
We sat around on a hotel balcony with a bottle of wine and tried to figure out how you would go about blowing up a planet. That's the kind of conversations science fiction writers have when they get together. We don't talk about football or anything like that. — Kevin J. Anderson
The boundary between science fiction and social reality is an optical illusion — Donna J. Haraway
Virtual reality, all the A.I. work we do, all the robotics work we do - we're as close to realizing science fiction as it gets. — Jensen Huang
Science fiction does not remain fiction for long. And certainly not on the Internet. — Vinton Cerf
Time travel used to be thought of as just science fiction, but Einstein's general theory of relativity allows for the possibility that we could warp space-time so much that you could go off in a rocket and return before you set out. — Stephen Hawking
I loved this smart, funny, big-hearted novel. As hilarious and wise as early Philip Roth, The Mathematician's Shiva will delight and move you. — Steven Strogatz
I do know that for the sympathy of one living being, I would make peace with all. I have love in me the likes of which you can scarcely imagine and rage the likes of which you would not believe. If I cannot satisfy the one, I will indulge the other. — Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
You must allow me to tell you how ardently I admire and love you. -Mr. Darcy — Jane Austen
Reconsidering Happiness captures all the contradictory impulses of falling in and out of love-the lust and wanderlust, the contentment and restlessness, the secret loyalties, the hard compromises. Sherrie Flick has written a wise and elegant novel. — John Dalton
I used to go with my parents and loved it, I was in school plays, and I started reading plays before I started reading novels. I'll defend it to the hilt. When theatre is good it is fabulous. — Patrick Marber
Life is like a novel. It's filled with suspense. You have no idea what is going to happen until you turn the page. — Sidney Sheldon
I should love to do a novel, about one abnormal character seeing present-day life, very ordinary life, yet arresting through it, abnormality, until at the end the reader sees, and with little reluctance, that he is not abnormal at all, and that the main character might as well be himself. — Patricia Highsmith
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
Eat good dinners and drink good wine; read good novels if you have the leisure and see good plays; fall in love, if there is no reason why you should not fall in love; but do not pore over influenza statistics. — Jerome K. Jerome
Great Novels Quotes
Comic books and graphic novels are a great medium. It's incredibly underused. — Darren Aronofsky
Oh, how few find time for prayer! There is time for everything else, time to sleep and time to eat, time to read the newspaper and the novel, time to visit friends, time for everything else under the sun, but-no time for prayer, the most important of all things, the one great essential! — Oswald J. Smith
This is not a novel to be tossed aside lightly. It should be thrown with great force. — Dorothy Parker
The great American novel has not only already been written, it has already been rejected. — Frank Dane
I don't think anyone has written a great graphic novel. — Ted Rall
The great advantage of a novel is you can put in whatever comes into your head - it has the same shape as the human brain. — Michel Houellebecq
I'm just trying to tell a good story and make thought-provoking, entertaining films. I just try and draw upon the great culture we have as a people, from music, novels, the streets. — Spike Lee
I'm a great believer in gathering together all your obsessions and seeing if you can make a novel out of them. — Scarlett Thomas
It is my contention that a really great novel is made with a knife and not a pen. A novelist must have the intestinal fortitude to cut out even the most brilliant passage so long as it doesn't advance the story. — Frank Yerby
Novel Writing Quotes
Well, when I am fifty-three or so I would like to write a novel as good as Persuasion but with a modern setting, of course. For the next thirty years or so I shall be collecting material for it. If anyone asks me what I work at, I shall say, 'Collecting material'. No one can object to that. — Stella Gibbons
But compared to writing a novel, where you can be God, I did the Bay of Pigs invasion in six pages once, and there were 50,000 guys with boots that I didn't have to pay, and all those extras; we didn't have to pay them. — John Sayles
Writing a novel is not method acting and I find it easy to step out of it at cocktail hour. — Bret Easton Ellis
Architecture is a discipline that takes time and patience. If one spends enough years writing complex novels one might be able, someday, to construct a respectable haiku. — Thom Mayne
I began writing 'Matterhorn' in 1975 and for more than 30 years I kept working on my novel in my spare time, unable to get an agent or publisher to even read the manuscript. — Karl Marlantes
When I put together a graphic novel, I don't think about literary prose. I think about storytelling. — Ted Rall
If I had to rank my skills, I have a long way to go before I can write a good graphic novel. — Ted Rall
Novel writing should never be confused with journalism. Unfortunately, in the case of Primary Colors, a fair number of journalists confused. — Joe Klein
Any fool can write a novel but it takes real genius to sell it. — J. G. Ballard
Doing graphic novels is cool! It's fun! You get to write something, and then see it visually page by page, panel by panel, working with the artist, you get to see it fleshed out. — Anthony Bourdain
My platform has been to reach reluctant readers. And one of the best ways I found to motivate them is to connect them with reading that interests them, to expand the definition of reading to include humor, science fiction/fantasy, nonfiction, graphic novels, wordless books, audio books and comic books. — Jon Scieszka
The work never matches the dream of perfection the artist has to start with. — William Faulkner
We don't read novels to have an experience like life. Heck, we're living lives, complete with all the incompleteness. We turn to fiction to have an author assure us that it means something. — Orson Scott Card
If you write one story, it may be bad; if you write a hundred, you have the odds in your favor. — Edgar Rice Burroughs
Good fiction must be entertaining- but what makes fiction special- and True- is that the realness of a novel allows it to carry a larger message. — Jerry B. Jenkins
I am irritated by my own writing. I am like a violinist whose ear is true, but whose fingers refuse to reproduce precisely the sound he hears within. — Gustave Flaubert
Every novel is a debtor to Homer. — Ralph Waldo Emerson
Many Scandinavian writers who had made their name in literary fiction felt they wanted to have a go at the crime novel to show they could compete with the best. If Salman Rushdie had been Norwegian, he would definitely have written at least one thriller. — Jo Nesbo
Wesley Stace has always been the only genuinely gifted fiction writer who also happens to be a rock star, but Wonderkid is the book he was born to write. And if you prefer your novels brazen, poignant and hilarious, as I do, you were born to read it. Like a great show, this will stay with you long after the last cymbal crash and power strum. — Sam Lipsyte
The real origin of science fiction lay in the seventeeth-century novels of exploration in fabulous lands. Therefore Jules Verne's story of travel to the moon is not science fiction because they go by rocket but because of where they go. It would be as much science fiction if they went by rubber band. — Philip K. Dick
The novels that get praised in the NY Review of Books aren't worth reading. Ninety-seven percent of science fiction is adolescent rubbish, but good science fiction is the best and only literature of our times. — Robert Anton Wilson
Fiction is very greedy. It will take all you know and then some. The first novel I tried to write, I was struck by this - the appetite of the blank page for ever more information, ever more data. An empty book is a greedy thing. You are right: You wind up using everything you know, and often more than once. — John Updike
There simply must be a corpse in a detective novel,
and the deader the corpse the better. — S. S. Van Dine
We all have a lot of people inside us, yet we get to live only one life. Fiction lets us slip into someone else’s skin, so to speak. That’s why we read novels, and also why we write them - to experience more life, through imagination. — Steven Saylor
In the past, it was only in science fiction novels that you could read about ordinary people being able to go to space... But you laid the foundation for space tourism. — Nursultan Nazarbayev
Before I was reading science fiction, I read Hemingway. Farewell to Arms was my first adult novel that said not everything ends well. It was one of those times where reading has meant a great deal to me, in terms of my development - an insight came from that book. — Robert Reed
All the great novels, all the great films, all the great dramas are fictions that actually tell us the truth about us or about human nature or about human situations without being tied into the minutia of documentary events. Otherwise we might as well just make documentaries. — Jeremy Northam
It means that no matter what you write, be it a biography, an autobiography, a detective novel, or a conversation on the street, it all becomes fiction as soon as you write it down. — Guillermo Cabrera Infante
I don't mean that literary fiction is better than genre fiction, On the contrary; novels can perform two functions and most perform only one. — Mark Haddon
Great fiction shows us not how to conduct our behavior but how to feel. Eventually, it may show us how to face our feelings and face our actions and to have new inklings about what they mean. A good novel of any year can initiate us into our own new experience. — Eudora Welty
Writing fiction is for me a fraught business, an occasion of daily dread for at least the first half of the novel, and sometimes all the way through. The work process is totally different from writing nonfiction. You have to sit down every day and make it up. — Joan Didion
I was uncomfortable writing fiction. My love was the personal essay, rather than the novel. — Alain de Botton
Jigsaw Lady is the working title of a science fiction novel I've had in my head for darn near 15 years. I think I'll start work on it next year (in all my spare time) but I'd like to get it finished some day. — Raymond E. Feist
I'm writing another novel and I know what I'm going to do after, which may be something more like this again, maybe some strange mixture of fiction and non-fiction. — Penelope Lively
The 'interactive fiction' format hasn't changed in any fundamental way since the early 1970s, in the same way that the format of the novel hasn't since 1700. — Graham Nelson
The short story that eventually grew into Constellation was the first fiction set in Russia that I'd ever written, and that was right around the time I was giving up on a doomed, never-to-be-seen first novel. While I saw it could be something bigger, in hindsight fortuitous timing was as responsible as anything. — Anthony Marra
Wrote a science fiction novel about a man who wins an argument with his wife, but it was rejected for being too farfetched. — Dana Gould
I began to write fiction on the assumption that the true enemies of the novel were plot, character, setting and theme, and having once abandoned these familiar ways of thinking about fiction, totality of vision or structure was really all that remained. — John Hawkes
I read secular fiction, but also enjoy novels with a Christian worldview. — Randy Alcorn
There is no such thing as too ordinary to write about, whether that's life or a scene in a novel. What's interesting to people, whether it's memoir or fiction, is the truth. — Augusten Burroughs
My novels are in the literature section as opposed to the romance section of bookstores because they're not romance novels. If I tried to have them published as romances, they'd be rejected. I write dramatic fiction; a further sub-genre would classify them as love stories. — Nicholas Sparks
I also read modern novels - I have just had to read 60 as I am one of the judges for the Orange Fiction Prize. — Kate Adie
The novel doesn't come into existence until certain methods of reproducing fiction come along. — Leslie Fiedler
My dream remains to inform and entertain through fiction in the form of novels and movies that compete in the marketplace of ideas. — Jerry B. Jenkins
Everybody walks past a thousand story ideas every day. — Orson Scott Card
In Conclusion
Which quotation resonated with you best? Did you enjoy our collection of fiction novels quotes? Or may be you have a slogan about fiction novels to suggest. Let us know using our contact form.
Citation
Feel free to cite and use any of the quotes in this collection of fiction novels quotations. For popular citation styles(APA, Chicago, MLA), please use this citation page.
