Top 575 Novels Quotes

I strongly believe that the art of the novel works best when the writer identifies with whoever he or she is writing about. Novels in the end are based on the human capacity, compassion, and I can show more compassion to my characters if I write in a first person singular.

I’ve written 16 children’s books and five unpublished novels. Some of the latter were breathtakingly bad.

Novels are one of the few remaining areas of narrative storytelling where one person does almost all of the creative heavy lifting.

I would be pleased if someone would invent a pill to remove my impatience, moodiness, and occasional bursts of anger. But if they did, I wouldn’t be able to write my novels or paint.

I’ve only written two novels, neither of them published, where the book is dominated by a male point of view; in the ‘Onyx Court’ series, it’s split roughly 50/50.

But then in novels the most indifferent hero comes out right at last. Some god comes out of a theatrical cloud and leaves the poor devil ten thousand-a-year and a title.

In writing, I’m totally anti-plans of any kind. All my attempts to plan and plot novels have come to grief, and in expensive ways.

If I really considered myself a writer, I wouldn’t be writing screenplays. I’d be writing novels.

If something is crucial to the plot, then I’d better be sure I’ve got my facts straight. Readers of crime novels are smart and savvy, and they’ll waste no time letting me know if there’s a hole in my plot.

I spent many years of my life as an economist and demographer. I was finally distracted by writing my novels and poetry. I’m enormously happy that was the case. I feel that with writing I have found my metier.

Authors can easily produce ebook versions of novels and shorter work which publishers don’t own.

I spend about a year between novels.

I like to take people you wouldn’t really think people would write novels about: an aqueduct engineer, a code-breaker, a hedge-fund manager. It’s in those sorts of lives that I find more fascination than in a CIA operative or a Marine or something like that.

I don’t like the word rock opera, but I’m trying to write on that level that’s reserved for plays still, or novels.

Total oblivion is the fate of almost everything in this world. I’m very likely to suffer that same fate; my work will probably not be remembered, and if any of it is, if any of those novels is fated to be one of those novels that is still being read 50 or 100 years after it was written, I’ve probably already written it.

I suppose I’m proudest of my novels for what’s imagined in them. I think the world of my imagination is a richer and more interesting place than my personal biography.

If you ask people if they enjoy crime novels, they’ll say, ‘Oh, my guilty pleasure is…’ then name a really brilliant crime writer.

I have more than 100 legal pads filled with handwriting. Eight novels, two books for children, countless stories and essays.

Before novels written by women were relegated to their own ‘genre,’ I was introduced to Jane Smiley by a dear professor who raised my awareness of what female authors were bringing to the table of contemporary fiction.

Even the best novels have their share of stinker lines.

I don’t like to make strong statements. I want to write strong novels… I keep my deep, radical things for my novels.

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.

I bought a selection of short, romantic fiction novels, studied them, decided that I had found a formula and then wrote a book that I figured was the perfect story. Thank goodness it was rejected.

Writing historical novels can be dangerous. We need to be as accurate and as fair about the historical record as we can be, at the same time as creating our fictional characters and, hopefully, telling a good story. The challenge is weaving the fiction into the history.

Between fourteen and nineteen, I must have begun and abandoned six novels.

I’ve read probably 25 or 30 books by Balzac, all of Tolstoy – the novels and letters – and all of Dickens. I learned my craft from these guys.

No one in a novel by Virginia Woolf ever filled up the petrol tank of her car. No one in Hemingway’s postwar novels ever worried about the effects of prolonged exposure to the threat of nuclear war.

I can’t inhabit my characters until I know what kind of work they do. This requires research because my jobs for the last decade have been author and professor, and I’d like to spare the world more author or professor novels.

I take a lot from everywhere. I take from music, architecture, novels, and plays. Anywhere that hits you.

My view is that comic books are meant to be long-form stories. They’re meant to be novels.

I abhor crime novels in which the main character can behave however he or she pleases, or do things that normal people do not do, without those actions having social consequences.

My wife is the most savage critic. She doesn’t feel intimidated by my reputation. As far as she’s concerned, she’s just criticising a boyfriend who’d recently had a go at fiction. She can tell me to abandon whole novels.

Biographies are, in their nature, far more difficult to make into films than novels, because novels come with plots constructed and dialogue written, whereas I don’t invent dialogue for my subjects or plot their lives for them.

I myself love getting cookbooks and novels that some congenial person has already tried and liked.

There was a time in my life when I wasn’t sure I’d ever write a short story again because I had started writing novels, and I am fundamentally a lazy person, and the fact is that a novel is a lazy person’s form, really. That is, you can amble; you can digress.

I’m probably only going to make 10 movies, so I’m already planning on what I’m going to do after that. That’s why I’m counting them. I have two more left. I want to stop at a certain point. What I want to do, basically, is I want to write novels, and I want to write theatre, and I want to direct theatre.

I’ve tried very hard and I’ve never found any resemblance between the people I know and the people in my novels.

The novels that have fascinated me most are the ones that have reached me less through the channels of the intellect or reason than bewitched me.

I’m a big fan of martial arts films, novels and radio programs.

I have heard of novels started in the middle, at the end, written in patches to be joined together later, but I have never felt the slightest desire to do this.

I am a writer, which means I write stories, I write novels, and I would write poetry if I knew how to. I don’t want to limit myself.

I always thought ‘chick lit’ meant third-person contemporary funny novels, dealing with issues of the day. I mean, it’s not the ideal term; when I’m asked to describe what I do, I say I write romantic comedies, cause that’s what I feel they are. But I’m quite pragmatic.

After 30 novels, release day is still a thrill. It’s always a little bittersweet, too.

Trollope wrote so many novels and other works that they tend to crowd each other out.

I make a rod for my own back because people see my novels as quasi documentaries. But it is never history that’s the main event of my books. It’s my characters.

I’m a severe graphic novels junkie. People ask me about it, and I say I like the graphic novels. Comic books are for kids, and graphic novels are for adults. But you can’t really separate the two.

As for writing novels – it’s what I’ve done for 30 some-odd years. I can’t suddenly say I’m going to take up golf. I need something in my life. As long as I can write a coherent sentence, I’ll keep at it.

I wanted to become a director before I wanted to become a writer. When I was 10, people would ask me what I wanted to be when I grew up, and I said, ‘Walt Disney.’ I wanted to make films. But I wasn’t offered a camera. I was offered language. So I started telling stories in the theatre and then in my novels.

Graphic novels are such a visually creative world – it’s really interesting what they can do in one sketch. Now I’m hooked.

I never even had the time to read novels.

Character is character and voice is voice, which translates nicely from writing novels to writing TV. But the process is different. You have a writer’s room, people pitch you jokes and you collaborate.

Novels demand a certain complexity of narrative and scope, so it’s necessary for the characters to change.

My first two novels were very black comedies.

I save the best of myself for novels, and I believe it shows.

I like reading novels because it provides insight into human behavior.

History is present in all my novels. And whether I am directly talking about the sociological moment or just immersing my character in the environment, I am very aware of it.

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.