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
All great literature is one of two stories; a man goes on a journey or a stranger comes to town. — Leo Tolstoy
The great American novel has not only already been written, it has already been rejected. — Frank Dane
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
It's with bad sentiments that one makes good novels. — Aldous Huxley
Twentieth-century Russian literature has produced nothing special except perhaps one novel and two stories by Andrei Platonov, who ended his days sweeping streets. — Joseph Brodsky
The novel wins by points, the short story by knockout. — Julio Cortazar
A novel is never anything, but a philosophy put into images. — Albert Camus
The novel is not so much a literary genre, but a literary space, like a sea that is filled by many rivers. — Jose Saramago
She liked Victorian novels. They were the only kind of novel you could read while eating an apple. — Stella Gibbons
A good novel doesn't just transcend the boundaries of its target market - it knows nothing about target markets. — Julianna Baggott
For your information, a good novel can change the world. Keep that in mind before you attempt to sit down at a typewriter. Never waste time on something you don't believe in yourself. — John Fante
Buying books would be a good thing if one could also buy the time to read them in: but as a rule the purchase of books is mistaken for the appropriation of their contents. — Arthur Schopenhauer
A good writer is not, per se, a good book critic. No more so than a good drunk is automatically a good bartender. — Jim Bishop
A good traveler has no fixed plans, and is not intent on arriving. — Lao Tzu
Great minds discuss ideas.Average minds discuss events.Small minds discuss people.
Life is a book, and every day that we live is a new page, so paint every page of your life with amazing colors of good deeds and amazing adventures. — Prince Ali Salman Aga Khan Aly Khan
I read in a book that a man called Christ went about doing good. It is very disconcerting to me that I am so easily satisfied with just going about. — Toyohiko Kagawa
In a good book the best is between the lines. — Swedish Proverbs
Great is the fortune of he who possesses a good bottle, a good book, and a good friend. — Moliere
Great Literature Quotes
We shouldn't teach great books; we should teach a love of reading. Knowing the contents of a few works of literature is a trivial achievement. Being inclined to go on reading is a great achievement. — B. F. Skinner
Herman Melville was as separated from a civilized literature as the lost Atlantis was said to have been from the great peoples of the earth. — Edward Dahlberg
So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past. — F. Scott Fitzgerald
Not all of us can do great things. But we can do small things with great love.
As I passed along the side walls of Westminster Abbey, I hardly saw any thing but marble monuments of great admirals, but which were all too much loaded with finery and ornaments, to make on me at least, the intended impression. — Karl Philipp Moritz
Great literature should do some good to the reader: must quicken his perception though dull, and sharpen his discrimination though blunt, and mellow the rawness of his personal opinions. — A. E. Housman
One of the best known, and one of the least intelligible, facts of literary history is the lateness, in Western European Literature at any rate, of prose fiction, and the comparative absence, in the two great classical languages, of what we call by that name. — George Saintsbury
Acknowledge all of your small victories. They will eventually add up to something great.
Every great political campaign rewrites the rules; devising a new way to win is what gives campaigns a comparative advantage against their foes. — John Podhoretz
First of all, the Jewish religion has a great deal in common with the Christian religion because, as Rabbi Gillman points out in the show, Christianity is based on Judaism. Christ was Jewish. — Barbara Walters
Pop changes week to week, month to month. But great music is like literature. — Ravi Shankar
Although spoken English doesn't obey the rules of written language, a person who doesn't know the rules thoroughly is at a great disadvantage. — Marilyn vos Savant
Reading Novels Quotes
Reading a novel in which all characters illustrate patience, hard work, chastity, and delayed gratification could be a pretty dull experience. — Thomas Perry
I've read short stories that are as dense as a 19th century novel and novels that really are short stories filled with a lot of helium. — Lynn Abbey
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
You need a little bit of insanity to do great things.
Within my own life, I read all the beloved novels by lamps of vegetable oil; I saw the Standard Oil invading my own village, I saw gas lamps in the Chinese shops in Shanghai; and I saw their elimination by electric lights. — Hu Shih
Life is like reading a novel or running a marathon. It’s not so much about reaching a goal but rather about the journey itself and the experiences along the way. — Edward O. Thorp
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
Oh, that sound? I'm in the hot tub, reading a novel. — Jane Smiley
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
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
This is why I read novels: so I can escape my own unrelenting monologue. — Carol Shields
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
Failure is a great teacher, and, if you are open to it, every mistake has a lesson to offer.
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
To a great mind, nothing is little.
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
Fiction Novels Quotes
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
I'm working on a nonfiction book on Nepal and a novel about diasporas. — Louise Brown
It is perfectly okay to write garbage – as long as you edit brilliantly. — C. J. Cherryh
Average people have great ideas. Legends have great execution.
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
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
The work never matches the dream of perfection the artist has to start with. — William Faulkner
Don't fear the failure... in great attempts it is glorious even to fail.
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
Modern Novel 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
The master of ceremonies asked people to say what they thought the function of the novel might be in modern society, and one critic said, “To provide touches of color in rooms with all-white walls.” Another one said, “To describe blow-jobs artistically. — Kurt Vonnegut
Many modern novels have a beginning, a muddle and an end. — Philip Larkin
No one has ever made himself great by showing how small someone else is.
After closely examining my conscience, I venture to state that in my historical novels I intended the content to be just as modern and up-to-date as in the contemporary ones. — Lion Feuchtwanger
The wildest ride in modern crime novel exoticum. A novel so steeped in milieu that it feels as if you've blasted to mars in the grip of a demon who won't let you go. Read this book, savor the language-it's the last-and the most compelling word in thrillers. — James Ellroy
The historical novel gives us perspective on our modern lives and helps us connect with the story, which we are continuing ourselves. — Mary Pope Osborne
There follows a little obscenity here, a dash of philosophy there, considerable whining overall, and a modern satirical novel is born. — Renata Adler
Joaquin Jackson's frank and colorful account of his long career as a modern-day Texas Ranger thrills like an action novel, yet the stories are true, sometimes funny, sometimes tragic, but always gripping. I could hardly put the book down. . . .The writing is superb. — Elmer Kelton
In modern novels I try to not let myself get away and to be here, and that's why I write about my life and myself. But even when I do that there's an element of disappearing to a place that's not me. It's "the selflessness of writing". It seldom happens, but when it does it's worth quite a lot. — Karl Ove Knausgard
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
Comic books and graphic novels are a great medium. It's incredibly underused. — Darren Aronofsky
This is not a novel to be tossed aside lightly. It should be thrown with great force. — Dorothy Parker
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
The study of history is a powerful antidote to contemporary arrogance. It is humbling to discover how many of our glib assumptions, which seem to us novel and plausible, have been tested before, not once but many times and in innumerable guises; and discovered to be, at great human cost, wholly false. — Paul Johnson
Nothing is so painful to the human mind as a great and sudden change. — Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
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
In a novel, the author gives the leading character intelligence and distinction. Fate goes to less trouble: mediocrities play a part in great events simply from happening to be there. — Charles Maurice de Talleyrand
A novel is never anything, but a philosophy put into images. — Jim Rohn
You don't sit up in a cave and write the Great American Novel and know it is utterly superb, and then throw it page by page into the fire. You just don't do that. You send it out. You have to send it out. — Theodore Sturgeon
Many years from now when your children ask what New York City was like just after 9/11, this will be the book you give them in response. It's an exquisite novel full of heart, soul, passion and intelligence, and it's the one this great New York author was born to write. — Lee Child
Love is a temporary madness. It erupts like an earthquake and then subsides. — Louis de Bernieres
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
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
The English tradition offers the great tapestry novel, where you have the emotional aspect of a detective's personal life, the circumstances of the crime and, most important, the atmosphere of the English countryside that functions as another character. — Elizabeth George
There is always something of the writer in the work but I don't think Melville had to be swallowed by a whale to write a great novel. If I had lived the lives of all the characters of the songs I've written, that would truly be an extraordinary story. — Michael Stipe
Sometimes, as in a great novel, you cannot see until you get to the end that God was leaving clues for you all along. — Lauren F. Winner
Few of us write great novels; all of us live them. — Mignon McLaughlin
A great novel is worth one thousand films. — Oscar Hijuelos
We don't have a great war in our generation, or a great depression, but we do, we have a great war of the spirit. We have a great revolution against the culture. The great depression is our lives. We have a spiritual depression. — Chuck Palahniuk
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
Yugoslavia was a kind of superpower. Great movies. Beautiful novels. Great rock-and-roll. We became a superpower in basketball. The problem is that people needed to identify more strongly with it after Tito and his awful, tricky way of leading the country. — Emir Kusturica
Today I began the novel that I determined to be great. — Zane Grey
French novels generally treat of the relations of women to the world and to lovers, after marriage; consequently there is a great deal in French novels about adultery, about improper relations between the sexes, about many things which the English public would not allow. — Lafcadio Hearn
No novel has ever changed anything, as far as I can see. And the great satirists, like Swift and Dickens, tend to write about abuses and injustices that have already been partially corrected - you write about it after it's over. — Martin Amis
I was in Los Angeles making 'Dead Again' and the producer, Lindsay Doran , asked me if I'd be interested in adapting this book, .. Austen is my favorite author and I thought, 'Well, of course, I'd be very interested, but I don't know how. I don't know where to start, A, writing a screenplay and B, sort of adapting it from a great novel. — Emma Thompson
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
Poison Pill is a great reading. The novel ranges from Russian oligarchs to the American worlds of drug research and the equity markets, all of it in a mode of high suspense. — Scott Turow
I don't think everyone wants to create the great American novel, but we all have a dream of telling our stories-of realizing what we think, feel, and see before we die. Writing is a path to meet ourselves and become intimate. — Natalie Goldberg
I always seem to get inspiration and renewed vitality by contact with this great novel land of yours which sticks up out of the Atlantic. — Winston Churchill
The light that radiates from the great novels time can never dim, for human existence is perpetually being forgotten by man and thus the novelists' discoveries, however old they may be, will never cease to astonish. — Milan Kundera
You can be interested in a Jane Smiley novel whether or not anyone says a word. She enters into her characters' thoughts with great understanding and depth. — Richard Russo
The rise of the dramas in the thirteenth century, and the rise of the great novels in a later period, together with their frank glorification of love and the joys of life, may be called the Third Renaissance. — Hu Shih
Narrative art, the novel, from Murasaki to Proust, has produced great works of poetry. — Eugenio Montale
My father was a frustrated writer. I think he wanted to write the great American novel. — Anne Waldman
A psychologically engrossing novel about the homes we make-in our houses, in our neighborhoods, and in the hearts of our loved ones. Laken takes on that great unspoken American subject-class-and does so with frankness, acuity and surpassing feeling. DREAM HOUSE is a memorable debut novel from a fully mature talent. — Peter Ho Davies
I went and looked at one of these great cathedrals one day, and I was blown away by it. From there I became interested in how cathedrals were built, and from there I became interested in the society that built the medieval cathedral. It occurred to me at some point that the story of the building of a cathedral could be a great popular novel. — Ken Follett
It will be worthy of a free, enlightened, and, at no distant period, a great nation, to give to mankind the magnanimous and too novel example of a people always guided by an exalted justice and benevolence. — George Washington
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
In Conclusion
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