All Quotes, Novel

85+ Novel Quotes

A novel is a fictitious prose narrative of book length, typically representing character and action with some degree of realism. A novel is original and of a kind not seen before. Novel defines a literary work based on the imagination and not necessarily on fact. This is a collection of 85+ quotes and sayings on Novel.


Life resembles a novel more often than novels resemble life. - George Sand
A novel is a work of poetry. In order to write it, one must have tranquility of spirit and of impression. - Fyodor Dostoevsky
The ear tends to be lazy, craves the familiar and is shocked by the unexpected; the eye, on the other hand, tends to be impatient, craves the novel and is bored by repetition. - W. H. Auden
The really great novel tends to be the exact negative of its author's life. - Andre Maurois
A novel is balanced between a few true impressions and the multitude of false ones that make up most of what we call life. - Saul Bellow
Growing up in the English countryside, I feel like I'm in a Jane Austen novel when I walk around. I just feel comfortable and confident in those surroundings. - Lily Collins
Every once in a while I feel the tremendous force of the novel. But it does not stay with me. - Zane Grey
In a revolution, as in a novel, the most difficult part to invent is the end. - Alexis de Tocqueville
When I'm working on a novel, I work 70-hour weeks. - Dean Koontz
A novel is like a sausage. You might like the final taste but you don't want to see how it was made. - Harlan Coben
Night is certainly more novel and less profane than day. - Henry David Thoreau
The only reason for the existence of a novel is that it does attempt to represent life. - Henry James
The liveliest effusions of wit and humour are simply what the reader of a novel has a right to expect. - Howard Jacobson
A novel is never anything, but a philosophy put into images. - Jim Rohn
A novel wouldn't be a book if there weren't some flights of fancy on the part of the author, stopping time to examine things, or to tell a joke. - Ned Vizzini
Writing a novel is a terrible experience, during which the hair often falls out and the teeth decay. - Flannery O'Connor
When you read a novel, your own imagery is the most important. It's what makes reading such a wonderful thing. - Daniel Craig
It's my own personal unconscious that ultimately creates the novel's aesthetic facade. - Manuel Puig
In a novel you have to resist the urge to tell everything. - J. K. Rowling
Only in a novel are all things given full play. - D. H. Lawrence
Coming up with novel ideas and converting them into real products has always been as natural as breathing for me. - Ralph H. Baer
In a novel, you have space to develop a character or a scene. You don't have that luxury in a 700-800-word picture book. - Kirby Larson
Innovation requires a novel approach to scientific problem solving, higher level of resource commitments over much longer time durations. - Dilip Shanghvi
Despite its challenges, the novel offers an opportunity to live in one story for years of your imaginative life. There's a tremendous richness to that. - Rebecca Makkai
Writing a novel is not method acting and I find it easy to step out of it at cocktail hour. - Bret Easton Ellis
Lost Illusion is the undisclosed title of every novel. - Andre Maurois
My first novel, 'The Tiger's Daughter,' embodies the loneliness I felt but could not acknowledge, even to myself, as I negotiated the no man's land between the country of my past and the continent of my present. - Bharati Mukherjee
A good novel tells us the truth about its hero; but a bad novel tells us the truth about its author. - Gilbert K. Chesterton
A novel is a mirror carried along a main road. - Stendhal
Life is God's novel. Let him write it. - Isaac Bashevis Singer
Sometimes writing a novel is not unlike having a baby. You'd have to ask a female novelist to compare the pain. - Salman Rushdie
The stupidity of people comes from having an answer for everything. The wisdom of the novel comes from having a question for everything. - Milan Kundera
The novel is not so much a literary genre, but a literary space, like a sea that is filled by many rivers. - Jose Saramago
There is no happiness in love, except at the end of an English novel. - Anthony Trollope
I think I honestly invented my own genre, the historical spy novel. - Alan Furst
In a novel, even if you put a country in the wrong hemisphere, which I've done, I can always claim it was part of the additional weirdness of the story. - Nick Harkaway
Only thanks to blissful ignorance, and the inspiration of my grandparents' story, did I actually believe tackling a novel would be an easy task. I've since learned otherwise. - Kristina McMorris
What 'War and Peace' is to the novel and 'Hamlet' is to the theater, Swan Lake' is to ballet - that is, the name which to many people stands for and sums up an art form. - Robert Gottlieb
I wrote my first novel in eighth grade for a boy named Kenny on whom I had an unrequited crush and who sat behind me in social studies. - Kate Christensen
The novel is a seduction; a reader has to be seduced. - T. C. Boyle
I'd never written a novel before, and I wrote a novel, and that turned out OK. - Rainbow Rowell
Writing a novel about feminism can be a thankless task. - Michelle Dean
Horror and supernatural novels give you a lot of what you look for in a crime novel, just with a twist that was very fresh for me as a reader. - Michael Koryta
It is so much hard work writing your first novel. You're not even sure that it is possible to do. - Asa Larsson
I might just write a novel next. I don't know! - Frank Ocean
Women want love to be a novel, men a short story. - Daphne du Maurier
You can write a short story in two hours. Two hours a day, you have a novel in a year. - Ray Bradbury
What's the challenge in writing a novel that few people will read? I'm more than happy writing what I do and have no plans to change that. - Nicholas Sparks
Writing a novel that crosses genres is a risk, but one well worth taking. - Chet Williamson
A lot of aspiring writers are all ready to write a novel, but they don't know how to write sentences. - Tom Robbins
You can throw a novel into focus with one overheard line. - Joan Didion
The novel avoids the sublime and seeks out the interesting. - Mason Cooley
There are no laws for the novel. There never have been, nor can there ever be. - Doris Lessing
When I start writing a novel, I have no sense of direction, no idea, really nothing. - William Gibson
England produced Shakespeare, and the British Empire the six-shilling novel. - George A. Moore
Entering a novel is like going on a climb in the mountains: You have to learn the rhythms of respiration - acquire the pace. Otherwise you stop right away. - Umberto Eco
A novel must be exceptionally good to live as long as the average cat. - Philip Stanhope, 4th Earl of Chesterfield
A good novel is worth more than the best scientific study. - Saul Bellow
A novel captures essence that is not possible in any other form. - Paul Theroux
It's not a good idea to put your wife into a novel; not your latest wife anyway. - Norman Mailer
The novel, for me, was an accident. I really don't consider myself a novelist. - Wole Soyinka
There's no reason you should write any novel quickly. - John Irving
As a writer, you must know what promise your story or novel makes. Your reader will know. - Nancy Kress
Creativity is generating ideas that are novel and useful. I define originals as people who go beyond dreaming up the ideas and take initiative to make their visions a reality. - Adam Grant
I've never yet managed to write a novel which didn't have an Indian central character. Salman Rushdie
A novel, I think, is partly about the contemporary and partly about the eternal, and it's the balance of that that's difficult to achieve. - Salman Rushdie
A novel that does not uncover a hitherto unknown segment of existence is immoral. Knowledge is the novel's only morality. - Milan Kundera
No... a novel is a long business. I'm a slow writer, even when I'm doing very well I write slowly. - Octavia E. Butler
Whenever I write a novel, music just sort of naturally slips in (much like cats do, I suppose). - Haruki Murakami
When you write a movie, you have a hundred collaborators. But when you write a novel, it's yours. - Sidney Sheldon
No novel has ever changed anything, as far as I can see. - Martin Amis
A novel is not a play. A novel takes one reader at a time into its confidence. It can be shockingly personal. Private, even. - Howard Jacobson
Actually, I enjoy the process of writing a big long novel. - Donna Tartt
A novel is something, while despair is nothing. - Mario Vargas Llosa
It takes a lot of energy and a lot of neurosis to write a novel. If you were really sensible, you'd do something else. - Lawrence Durrell
Any fool can write a novel but it takes real genius to sell it. - J. G. Ballard
Nothing is more interesting in a novel or a play than an affair. - Howard Jacobson
You do not have to dramatize everything. In fact, you usually can't, not without ending up with a half-million-word novel. - Nancy Kress
Successful fiction does not need to be validated by 'real life'; I cringe whenever a writer is asked how much of a novel is 'real'. - Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
A novel makes it possible to understand not just events, but the people who control the events; not only their choices, but also their motives. - David Frum
A novel is too much of a commitment. I tend to peruse Twitter - I check to see if I had any mentions and read the latest messages. - Kevin Nealon
All novels attempt to cut neural routes through the brain, to convince us that down this road the true future of the novel lies. - Zadie Smith
A short story is one idea; a novel is a whole soup of them. - Robert J. Sawyer
The unfolding of a story is both as exciting and as difficult for each and every novel I've written, regardless of time and place. - Rose Tremain
Among the many problems which beset the novelist, not the least weighty is the choice of the moment at which to begin his novel. - Vita Sackville-West
The hardest novel to write was Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant. - Anne Tyler
You have to have heart's passion to write a novel. - Alan Furst
The novel is an artifact, which is why antiquarians cling to it so fervently. - David Shields
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