Top 1200 Great Novels Quotes & Sayings

My first two novels were quirky detective stories followed by a couple of SF/Fantasy novels.

All great novels are great fairy tales.

In Pakistan, many of the young people read novels because in the novels, not just my novels but the novels of many other Pakistani writers, they encounter ideas, notions, ways of thinking about the world, thinking about their society that are different. And fiction functions in a countercultural way as it does in America and certainly as it did in the, you know, '60s.

I don't write historical novels but novels that wonder, 'And what if it happened in this way and not in this other one?'

They say great themes make great novels. but what these young writers don't understand is that there is no greater theme than men and women.

Movies are about people; there're not about ideas. It's like great novels. Great novels are not about ideas. There's never been a great novel about ideas.

Great novels have great characterization no matter what. But multiple points of view let me examine characters from entirely different perspectives, allowing me to learn more about everyone in the process.

I grew up on genre - on Westerns, spy thrillers, sci-fi, fantasy novels, horror novels. Especially horror novels.

I am suspicious of writers who say their work is original and influenced by nobody. If it is, it is probably uninteresting. The biggest source of novels is other novels.

The central question driving literary aesthetics in the age of the iPad is no longer 'How should novels be?' but 'Why write novels at all?'

I give people 'If You Came Softly' when they demand proof that novels for teens can be as good as the best novels for adults.

I write my novels personally, desperately and non-negligently. When I write my novels, I think about my novels only, and never do other works.

Now you mustn't think that I don't have any ideas for novels in my head. I've got ideas for ten novels in my head. But with every idea I have, I already foresee the wrong novels I would write, because I also have critical ideas in my head; I've got a full theory of the perfect novel, and that's what stumps me.

There are lots of authentic, moving characters in so-called systems novels, just as there are certainly deep structural ideas in some character-driven novels.

I have learned a great deal from novels. Some of it is even true.

They say great themes make great novels

I have read all my novels that were translated into English. Reading my novels is enjoyable because I forget almost all the content in them.

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.

People who know and read comics know that there's a huge diversity amongst the types of stories. Nobody ever goes 'how many more of these movies based on novels are there going to be?!'. People laugh at that question and they go novels, there are all different types of novels. But there are all different types of comic books, they just happen to have drawings on the cover!

I've been thinking a lot about why it was so important to me to do The Idiot as a novel, and not a memoir. One reason is the great love of novels that I keep droning on about. I've always loved reading novels. I've wanted to write novels since I was little. I started my first novel when I was seven.I don't have the same connection to memoir or nonfiction or essays. Writing nonfiction makes me feel a little bit as if I'm producing a product I don't consume - it's a really alienating feeling.

I think in general, novels by men tend to be taken more seriously than novels by women.

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.

One of the things that I love about writing novels is that it really doesn't matter what next step you take as long as you're pursuing some intuition or instinct. Of course, then, intuitions or instincts don't make for great novels, but they often make for good first drafts.

My first attraction to writing novels was the plot, that almost extinct animal. Those novels I read which made me want to be a novelist were long, always plotted, novels - not just Victorian novels, but also those of my New England ancestors: Herman Melville and Nathaniel Hawthorne.

I never got any training in how to write novels as an English major at Oberlin, but I got some great training for writing novels from anthropology and from Margaret Mead.

All great novels, all true novels, are bisexual.

I would be rejected if I submitted any of my novels as romance novels.

I had 'Push' and 'The Paperboy' next to my bed for many years. Those are some of the great, great novels.

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.

For a long time, since story collections look almost precisely like novels, I presumed that they were meant to be enjoyed in the same way as novels.

Critics are not creators. They rarely write great novels, invent new technologies, or come up with a great business idea.

All middle-class novels are about the trials of three, all upper-class novels about mass fornication, all revolutionary novels about a bad man turned good by a tractor.

Novels can change attitudes. Maybe we should speak quietly otherwise politicians will use novels as propaganda.

I was someone who really loved fantasy novels and science fiction novels.

Novels ought to have hope; at least, American novels ought to have hope. French novels don't need to. We mostly win wars, they lose them. Of course, they did hide more Jews than many other countries, and this is a form of winning.

I won't read novels while writing novels.

I give people If You Came Softly when they demand proof that novels for teens can be as good as the best novels for adults.

I was a sci-fi addict when I was a kid and a teenager. Novels, graphic novels, movies, it was my way to deal with reality.

Comic books and graphic novels are a great medium. It's incredibly underused.

I keep thinking I'll enjoy suspense novels, and sometimes I do. I've read about 20 Dick Francis novels.

I prefer short stories, but publishers would, of course, rather that writers produce novels, since novels are still more commercially viable.

I have a lot of novels that I haven't finished. I usually get 150 pages in and I realize it's not going anywhere. I don't publish everything I write. I must have six unfinished novels at least.

I'm not writing novels, the screenplays are my novels, so I'm gonna write it the best that I can. If the movie never gets made, it'd almost be okay because I did it. It's there on the page.

There are loads of novels that I really love, like Haruki Murakami's books, and when I read them, I do think about how they would work as an anime. But I do believe that those are great books because they work best as novels, or great manga work best in that form.

Movies are not novels, and that's why, when filmmakers try to adapt novels, particularly long or complex novels, the result is almost always failure. It can't be done.

I think there's a false division people sometimes make in describing literary novels, where there are people who write systems novels, or novels of ideas, and there are people who write about emotional things in which the movement is character driven. But no good novels are divisible in that way.

My novels are very much the same, as I think many people's novels are.

I don't really consider any of my novels 'crime' novels.

Great novels are always a little more intelligent than their authors.

We trust to novels to train us in the practice of great indignations and great generosity.

All I am in private life is a literary critic and historian, that's my job...And I'm prepared to say on that basis if anyone thinks the Gospels are either legends or novels, then that person is simply showing his incompetence as a literary critic. I've read a great many novels and I know a fair amount about the legends that grew up among early people, and I know perfectly well the Gospels are not that kind of stuff.

the great novels have marched with the years. They are the contemporaries of time.

When I am writing novels I don't read a lot of novels so I try to catch up in-between.

Novels with a "thesis" don't interest me. They just don't - novels that want to "show" something, that want to "argue" something specific. I don't read novels that are looking to convince me of anything.

People live for love. They kill for love. They die for love. They have songs, poems, novels, sculptures, paintings, myths, legends. It's one of the most powerful brain systems on Earth for both great joy and great sorrow.

Good novels are not written, they are rewritten. Great novels are diamonds mined from layered rewrites.

All things in my novels are real for me. Some western critics said that Garcia Marquez's novels are magic realism. However, I believe that Marquez must have experienced everything in his novels.

As to the number of novels I've abandoned... I shudder to think. I have thrown away five completed novels, and that's a gruesome enough figure. But not necessarily a waste of effort.

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.

After these three novels I gave up writing novels for a time; I was dissatisfied with romantic doom, yet didn't see much way around it.