These novel quotes will inspire you. A novel is a fictitious prose narrative of book length, typically representing character and action with some degree of realism.
A collection of motivating, happy, and encouraging novel quotes, novel sayings, and novel proverbs.
Inspirational Novel Quotes
- “The novel is a seduction; a reader has to be seduced.” T. C. Boyle
- “What makes literature interesting is that it does not survive its translation. The characters in a novel are made out of the sentences. That’s what their substance is.” Jonathan Miller
- “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
- “A lasting marriage, they say, is one where the two reach for different sections of the Sunday paper. Me, I go right for the obituaries, just like those very elderly characters in Muriel Spark’s spooky novel, ‘Memento Mori.’ ” Billy Collins
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“Life is God’s novel. Let him write it.” Isaac Bashevis
- “The person, be it gentleman or lady, who has not pleasure in a good novel, must be intolerably stupid.” Jane Austen
- “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
- “There are three rules for writing a novel. Unfortunately, no one knows what they are. “W. Somerset Maugham
- “Reading a book is like re-writing it for yourself. You bring to a novel, anything you read, all your experience of the world. You bring your history and you read it in your own terms.” Angela Carter
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“I see the poem or the novel ending with an open door.” Michael Ondaatje
- “Writing a short story is like painting a picture on the head of a pin. And just getting everything to fit is – sometimes seems impossible. Writing a novel, though, is – has its own challenges of scope. And I think of that as painting a mural, where the challenge is that if you are close enough to work on it, you’re too close to see the whole thing.” Rebecca Makkai
- “Nabokov, who I loved more than any other writer when I was young, had such contempt for dialogue. When I was younger, I never wrote a word of dialogue because of him. I thought it was a childish part of a novel.” Zadie Smith
- “In all seriousness, people think that it’s the ideas that are important. Well, everyone has ideas, all the time. I tend to write mine down and remember them, but at some point, you have to apply the bum to the seat and knock out about sixty-five thousand words – that’s how long a novel is.” Terry Pratchett
- “No matter how daring or cautious you may choose to be, in the course of your life, you are bound to come into direct physical contact with what’s known as Evil. I mean here not a property of the gothic novel but, to say the least, a palpable social reality that you in no way can control.” Joseph Brodsky , Novel quotes about life
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“I was born January 6, 1937, eight years after Wall Street crashed and two years before John Steinbeck published The Grapes of Wrath, his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel about the plight of a family during the Great Depression.” Lou Holtz
- “It’s true that at the time I was fond of Kurt Vonnegut and Richard Brautigan, and it was from them that I learned about this kind of simple, swift-paced style, but the main reason for the style of my first novel is that I simply did not have the time to write sustained prose.” Haruki Murakami
- “Stories of all lengths and depths come from different parts of the cave. For a novel, you must lay in mental, physical, and spiritual provision as for a siege or for a time of hectic explosions, while a short story is, or can be, a steady, timed flame like the lighting of a blowlamp on a building site full of dry tinder.” Jane Gardam
- “To read a novel requires a certain amount of concentration, focus, devotion to the reading. If you read a novel in more than two weeks, you don’t read the novel, really.” Philip Roth
- “The suspense of a novel is not only in the reader but in the novelist, who is intensely curious about what will happen to the hero.” Mary McCarthy
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“When writing a novel a writer should create living people; people not characters. A character is a caricature.” Ernest Hemingway
- “For me, writing a novel is like solving a puzzle. But I don’t intend my novels as puzzles. I intend them as invitations to dance.” Mohsin Hamid
- “For me, the short story is the depth of a novel, the breadth of a poem, and, as you come to the last few paragraphs, the experience of surprise.” Amy Bloom
- “Singer A fact is a simple statement that everyone believes. It is innocent unless found guilty. A hypothesis is a novel suggestion that no one wants to believe. It is guilty until found effective.” Edward Teller
- “The only reason for the existence of a novel is that it does attempt to represent life.” Henry James
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“A short story is the shortest distance between two points; a novel is the scenic route.” Robert J. Sawyer
- “In a revolution, as in a novel, the most difficult part to invent is the end.” Alexis de Tocqueville
- “I have likened writing a novel to going on a journey, with some notion of the destination I will arrive at, but not the whole picture – which emerges gradually as a series of revelations, as the journey goes along.” Rose Tremain
- “Think about George Orwell’s three-minute hate from the novel ‘1984’ and how that left everyone sort of exhausted and able to live their boring humdrum lives. If our lives are going to continue being unfulfilled and boring, perhaps we do need some sort of short-term violent chaos incorporated into them, to make them more palatable.” Chuck Palahniuk
- “The true self seeks release, not constraint. It doesn’t want to be corseted in a sonnet or made to learn a system of musical notations. It wants liberation, which is why very often it fastens on the novel, for the novel seems spacious, undefined, free.” Rachel Cusk
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“Women want love to be a novel, men a short story.” Daphne du Maurier
- “The first sentence of every novel should be: Trust me, this will take time but there is order here, very faint, very human. Meander if you want to get to town.” Michael Ondaatje
- “The philosophy of individualism owes a great deal to the tradition of novel-writing and novel-reading. In its development and in its aesthetics, the novel is not politically neutral; it has been a participant in history all along.” Sally Rooney
- “I wrote ‘Yellow Submarine’ for the Beatles. I wrote the screenplay for ‘The Games,’ about the Olympic Games. I wrote ‘Love Story,’ both the novel and the screenplay. I wrote ‘RPM’ for Stanley Kramer. Plus, I wrote two scholarly books and a 400-page translation from the Latin, and I dated June Wilkinson!” Erich Segal , Novel quotes on love
- “In many cases, the line between a thriller and a crime novel has become too blurred to be useful.” Susie Dent
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“I had a romance novel inside me, but I paid three sailors to beat it out of me with steel pipes.” Patton Oswalt
- “For me, writing a novel is like having a dream. Writing a novel lets me intentionally dream while I’m still awake. I can continue yesterday’s dream today, something you can’t normally do in everyday life.” Haruki Murakami
- “The earliest depiction of libertarian eugenics may have appeared in a science fiction novel, Robert Heinlein’s 1942 tale ‘Beyond This Horizon.’ ” Gregory Benford
- “Back in my 20s, when I wrote ‘A Place of Greater Safety,’ the French Revolution novel, I thought, ‘I’ll always have to write historical novels because I can’t do plots.’ But in the six years of writing that novel, I actually learned to write, to invent things.” Hilary Mantel
- “If you’re gonna use simile, analogy, metaphor, be descriptive and have some flowery adjectives and a few odd nouns and some engaging bits of dialogue or sentiment, then you’re sort of writing a novel, really. But rock lyrics are not really known for their sophistication.” Ian Anderson
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“My work is less violent because we tend to write what we want to read… and I’m not that interested in gruesome books. Any violence, to fit in well with a crime novel, has to have compassion.” Ann Cleeves
- “I think Henry Miller has had huge influence not because he wrote about sex, but because the memoir or the nonfiction novel has become such a monumental force in American publishing, if not in literature.” Leslie Fiedler
- “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
- “Since I have come to America, I am often asked whether my next novel will be set in America. I don’t think it will. I think I will be living in America for some time to come, but while living in America, I would like to write about Japanese society from the outside.” Haruki Murakami
- “The turning point was when I hit my 30th birthday. I thought, if really want to write, it’s time to start. I picked up the book How to Write a Novel in 90 Days. The author said to just write three pages a day, and I figured, I can do this. I never got past Page 3 of that book.” James Rollins
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“I’m working on a nonfiction book on Nepal and a novel about diasporas.” Louise Brown
- “I was one of seven, and we took a lot of road trips – long road trips. And this was before iPhones and iPads and DVD players in cars. I remember how novel it was when I got my own Walkman so I could listen to music.” Amy Adams
- “As for writing about temptation, there’s no drama without temptation, and no novel without drama.” Tom Perrotta
- “My fellow students there were very smart, but the really novel thing was that they actually seemed to put a lot of effort into their school work. By the end of my first semester there, I began to get into that habit as well.” Eric Allin Cornell
- “Any reviewer who expresses rage and loathing for a novel is preposterous. He or she is like a person who has put on full armor and attacked a hot fudge sundae.” Kurt Vonnegut
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“Life resembles a novel more often than novels resemble life.” George Sand
- “Whether or not you agree with Ayn Rand – and I have certain issues with some of her beliefs – the woman can tell a story. I mean, the novel as an art form is just in full florid bloom in ‘Atlas Shrugged.’ It’s an unbelievable story. The characters are so compelling, and what she’s saying is mind-expanding.” Anne Hathaway
- “It is fortunate that molecular synthesis also serves the utilitarian function of producing quantities of rare or novel substances which satisfy human needs, especially with regard to health, and the scientific function of stimulating research and education throughout the whole discipline of chemistry.” Elias James Corey
- “I think escapism is very important, certainly in my life. I love nothing more than escaping into the world of a film or a novel. To be involved in creating that for other people is a privilege.” Ben Barnes
- “I love the movies, and when I go to see a movie that’s been made from one of my books, I know that it isn’t going to be exactly like my novel because a lot of other people have interpreted it. But I also know it has an idea that I’ll like because that idea occurred to me, and I spent a year, or a year and a half of my life working on it.” Stephen King
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“When you read a novel, your own imagery is the most important. It’s what makes reading such a wonderful thing.” Daniel Craig
- “I was very influenced by The Magic Mountain. It’s a book that had a huge impact on me. I loved that as a shape for a novel: put a bunch of people in a beautiful place, give them all tuberculosis, make them all stay in a fur sleeping bag for several years and see what happens.” Ann Patchett
- “A novel that does not uncover a hitherto unknown segment of existence is immoral. Knowledge is the novel’s only morality.” Milan Kundera
- “My son, Wolf, was born when I was past 40 and the author of a best-selling novel. That means he has grown up a middle-class child – one who sometimes asks me for stories of my childhood but knows nothing of what it means to grow up poor and afraid. I have worked to make sure of that.” Dorothy Allison
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“I sometimes feel as if ideas for a novel kind of pop up like numbers in a bingo tumbler, and then they’re ready to go.” Meg Wolitzer
- “Let’s put it this way: if you are a novelist, I think you start out with a 20-word idea, and you work at it and you wind up with a 200,000-word novel. We, picture-book people, or at least I, start out with 200,000 words and I reduce it to 20.” Eric Carle
- “Only in a novel are all things given full play.” D. H. Lawrence
- “I think a construction project for me is like writing a novel. I can’t do the project unless I can envision sort of the whole structure and see what the end result might be.” David Bergen
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“I’ve never been good with deadlines. My early novels, I wrote by myself. No one knew I was writing a novel; I didn’t have a contract.” George R. R. Martin
- “To us, the value of a work lies in its newness: the invention of new forms, or a novel combination of old forms, the discovery of unknown worlds or the exploration of unfamiliar areas in worlds already discovered – revelations, surprises.” Octavio Paz
- “I believe that the short story is as different a form from the novel as poetry is, and the best stories seem to me to be perhaps closer in spirit to poetry than to novels.” Tobias Wolff
A novel is a long, fictional narrative that describes intimate human experiences.
