Novel Quotes

How astonishingly intimate the business of fiction is, more intimate than anything that issues from ...

Suspending moral judgement is not the immorality of the novel; it is its morality. The morality that...

This scene expresses the basic situation of immaturity; lyricism is an attempt to face that situatio...

He was looking for immensity. His life was hopelessly small, everything surrounding him was nondescr...

When he told F. of his disgust at the eyelid's movement, he must have been sixteen. When he decided ...

A novel does not assert anything, a novel poses questions... The stupidity of people comes from havi...

What drove such people to their sinister occupations? Spite? Certainly, but also the desire for orde...

But it was not only a feeling of guilt which drove him into danger. He detested the pettiness that m...

A novel examines not reality but existence. And existence is not what has occurred, existence is the...

The novel is born not of the theoretical spirit but of the spirit of humor.

No peace is possible between the novelist and the agélaste [those who do not laugh]. Never having he...

In the presence of Esch, values have hidden their faces. Order, loyalty, sacrifice—he cherishes all ...

She wants to have her notebooks so that the flimsy framework of events, as she has constructed them ...

You certainly remember this scene from dozens of films: a boy and a girl are running hand in hand in...

The stupidity of people comes from having an answer for everything. The wisdom of the novel comes fr...

When Don Quixote went out into the world, that world turned into a mystery before his eyes. That is ...

For it is clear immediately: human life as such is a defeat. All we can do in the face of that inelu...

Who was the real me? I can only repeat: I was a man of many faces.At meetings I was earnest, enthusi...

Their message will never be decoded… because people have no patience to listen to it in an age when ...

Their message will never be decoded, not only because there is no key to it, but also because people...

How would I explain to him that I couldn’t make peace with him? How would I explain that if I did I ...

That's not what I'm asking. I'm asking, what's your vice and what brand of trouble does it lead to?

For a moment, I wondered how different my life would have been had they been my parents, but I shook...

All they told me was that he was forty-two when he died. I just wanted...to find out more about what...

And when her lips met mine, I knew that I could live to be a hundred and visit every country in the ...

and all I could think was that I would like to spend every morning for the rest of my life waking up...

The world is a better place when you smile.

Yet losing him seemed unbearable. He was the one she loved, the one she would always love, and as he...

She couldn’t read his expression. As he started toward her, she recalled the way he’d seemed to glid...

Then he smiles because he knows deep in his bones that his dad has gone and said something really fu...

Experience, then, was something that enabled you to do nothing with a clear conscience. Experience w...

To read a novel is to wonder constantly, even at moments when we lose ourselves most deeply in the b...

And he always checks that he carries three things with him: faith, hope, and love.

Lyra marveled at the effect hope could have.

she delighted in being of the same substance as them, and in knowing that when she died her flesh wo...

Man is conceived in sin and born in corruption and he passeth from the stink of the didie to the ste...

As far as I can tell, a young-adult novel is a regular novel that people actually read.

Monsters are real and ghosts are real too they live inside us and sometimes they win.

His mind is like that. On the inside, where he never smiles.

Paths cross all the time in this world of ours, sometimes in the strangest places- Charles Jacobs

A novel is an impression, not an argument; and there the matter must rest.

Cases of typhoid take the following course:When the fever is at its height, life calls out to the pa...

And life? Life itself? Was it perhaps only an infection, a sickening of matter? Was that which one m...

Two questions form the foundation of all novels: "What if?" and "What next?" (A third question, "Wha...

But perhaps the greatest escapism of all is to take refuge in the domesticity of the past, the home ...

There are empty spaces that must be respected – those often long periods when a person can’t see the...

Fitzgerald has charm. It's a silly word, but it's an exact word for me. I like 'The Great Gatsby' an...

The use of imaginative fiction is to deepen your understanding of your world, and your fellow men, a...

They all dreamt of each other that night, as was natural, considering how thin the partitions were b...

A man is like a novel: until the very last page you don't know how it will end. Otherwise it wouldn'...

Above his head at street level, he saw an angled aileron of a scarlet Porsche, its jaunty fin more o...

Millions cheer the warriorspilling blood across the ringwhile the one who stands for peaceis ridicul...

You see that old woman? That will never happen to you. You will never grow old, and you will never d...

The world is full of obvious things which nobody by any chance ever observes.

It's terrific, Clare," Henry says, and we stare at each other, and I think, "Don't leave me.

It was a hymn with the force of a march, a march with the majesty of a hymn. It was the song of sold...

Beginning a novel is always hard. It feels like going nowhere. I always have to write at least 100 p...

Why must some of us deliberate between brands of toothpaste while others deliberate between damp dir...

Fe es aquello que nos permite creer en cosas que sabemos que no son ciertas.

«She had Google, and she had Wikipedia. She could look up anything obscure, any words or phrases tha...

Yet if he had been asked… if he were happy… He would have admitted readily enough that he was uncomf...

I enjoy writing fiction more than writing anything else. Wouldn't anyone?

The contract between the author and the reader is a game. And the game . . . is one of the greatest ...

Relate comic things in pompous fashion. Irregularity, in other words the unexpected, the surprising,...

Sometimes things are just what they seem to be and that's all there is to it.

In her past were sweet passages, in her future rosy hopes.

He did not yet known how many commenced lefe-romances are doomed never to get beyond the first, or a...

I also need to prepare myself for the inevitability of utter boredom: Very often, single people don'...

It is better to live presently. By living thus, perhaps we can learn to understand the nature of thi...

A novelist's job is almost to be a stupid as possible, except in the cunning moment when you need to...

It's strange but as I grow older, I find myself developing more optimism. I keep inching toward the ...

A good novel can be a doorstop to despair.

To be alive, to be man alive, to be whole man alive: that is the point. And at its best, the novel, ...

The gods command that there can be only one king. But I swear that I am no better than a common sold...

Alive, and one. We are one, and while we love, death will never touch us. 'The grave's a fine and pr...

It is the form that allows a writer the greatest opportunity to explore human experience...For that ...

How I would enjoy being told the novel is dead. How liberating to work in the margins, outside a cen...

I think politics is deadly to write about, frankly. If you have a political agenda and you set out t...

But there is no doubt that to attempt a novel of ideas is to give oneself a handicap: the parochiali...

Novels give you the matrix of emotions, give you the flavour of a time in a way formal history canno...

I write all these remarks with exactly the same feeling as if I were writing a letter to post into t...

I write all these remarks with exactly the same feeling as if I were writing a letter to post into t...

The novel is a formidable mass, and it is so amorphous - no mountain in it to climb, no Parnassus or...

The human mind is not a dignified organ, and I do not see how we can exercise it sincerely except th...

Ladies sheltering behind men, men sheltering behind servants - the whole system's wrong, and she mus...

I swear from the bottom of my heart I want to be healed. I want to be like other men, not this outca...

I went on steadily trying to 'find out how to'; but I wrote two or three novels without feeling that...

Now, my novel begins. No, now I begin my novel—and yet I cannot decide whether to call myself I or s...

Every novel which is truly written contributes to the total of knowledge which is there at the dispo...

I thought you'd be interested in these things as a government man. Ain't you mixed up in the prices ...

It was late morning when he woke and found the telephone beside his bed in the hotel tolling frantic...

In April war was declared with Germany. Wilson and his cabinet—a cabinet that in its lack of distinc...

Writing a novel is agony.

The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in the good of others; we are...

The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in the good of others; we are...

You can't really succeed with a novel anyway; they're too big. It's like city planning. You can't pl...

For a moment he came near to sharing their incredible belief—it would do no harm to mutter a prayer ...

Redwing had read somewhere that one of his favourite writers, Ernest Hemingway, had been asked what ...

My blackness is spreading, Alice. I’ve been seeing and hearing things that can’t be there or anywher...

The world is a huge space, but the space that will take you in - and itdoesn't have to be very big -...