Best Novel Quotes to Inspire, Uplift & Motivate You Every Day

“If you want to write the next great novel, but you think, No, this won't work because no one will buy it or it won't be any good, then you talk yourself out of taking a risk.”

“In a novel, it's hard to keep track of everybody.”

“I've been wanting to write a book about what goes into creating a novel, and the story behind 'A Passage to India' is especially interesting.”

“I would say the reason that I've never written a novel is because I've never written a novel.”

“Building a dollhouse is a lot like writing a novel because you are God of the Universe.”

“It takes me two to three years to write a novel. A screenplay is 100 pages and takes five years.”

“I didn't think I could pull off a novel.”

“What I'm definitely against is the plodding, paint-by-numbers 19th-century-style novel that's still being written today. I just don't understand why you'd read or write that in 2011.”

“It's always fun to talk about a novel.”

“Recently, I haven't had too much time to read. But I love a good romance novel.”

“I never know when I finish the novel I am writing which will be the next novel out of the station.”

“I had always secretly wanted to write a novel.”

“A novel usually takes me two years. A year to research and plan and dream. Then a year to write.”

“I wrote a novel, so now they can call me a novelist. I tell stories; that's it.”

“Why does any novelist keep writing long after they've made money? Because they've failed to write the perfect novel.”

“A lot of people have trouble with their second novel - the dreaded sophomore jinx. I wrote three books in between the two novels, and they just weren't very good.”

“I definitely want to act and I want to sing. If those two fall through, I want to become a writer, probably, like a songwriter for other people, or a novel writer. I write a lot, and I read a lot. I like reading fiction.”

“I took two years away from making films to write a novel.”

“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.”

“One of the ways my first novel failed was that I was too in love with my characters.”

“I once tried to write a novel about revenge. It's the only book I didn't finish. I couldn't get into the mind of the person who was plotting vengeance.”

“There was an ITV television production of the second novel I wrote, called 'Murder of Quality.' It was a little murder story set in a public school - I'd once taught at Eton, and I used that stuff.”

“A novel is both a story and a piece of writing. A movie is a story and a piece of filmmaking.”

“I like shape very much. A novel has to have shape, and life doesn't have any.”

“I still write the occasional short story, and poked at a novel once, but it's just not what I want to do.”

“I spent four of my five years at Stanford writing a novel I was unable to sell.”

“I'm not sure I have the physical strength to undertake a novel.”

“I suspect there are two kinds of novelists. Those who have a point of view and have something to say and then write a novel in order to say that thing, and those of us who write the book in order to find out what we think about that thing.”

“A scrupulous man will never produce a great novel.”

“It's hard for me to think of writing a novel, because it takes so long.”

“A novel is about people.”

“I'm skeptical that the novel will be 're-invented.'”

“Any setting can be a good setting for a novel.”

“I wanted to write a novel. At 12 I knew, I am a writer. I said it to nobody.”

“'Annapurna' is a sort of novel. It's a novel, but a true novel.”

“When I'm writing a novel, I'm usually just trying to write about things that are interesting to me.”

“The novel is a seduction; a reader has to be seduced.”

“Before trying a novel I wrote a couple of plays.”

“When I was 19, I wrote a novel, which was not very good, but I finished it.”

“I never know as a writer when I set out into a novel where it's going to take me.”

“I'm always reading a novel. If it's good, I remember why I love my job.”

“I wrote my first novel because I wanted to read it.”

“I've read every single fantasy novel there is. I mean, I would challenge a lot of people to read more fantasy novels than I have.”

“If someone had told me in high school that one day I'd write an historical novel, I would have rolled my eyes.”

“I started my first novel when I was 10, and have produced thousands of pages of juvenilia since.”

“I am a working person. I always work, study or do research for my novel. I even work on Sunday.”

“The last romantic novel I think I read was 'Tess of the d'Urbervilles.'”

“I'm never doing a long novel again, truly.”

“I had a few stories and longer pieces published, but my first proper novel came in 2003, called 'Dead I Well May Be.'”

“A good novel is worth more than the best scientific study.”

“When I was writing 'The White Tiger' I lived in a building pretty much exactly like the one I described in this novel, and the people in the book are the people I lived with back then. So I didn't have to do much research to find them.”

“What do you do in a novel? You take recognizable characters from your own life, and you fantasize about what they're really like.”

“I'd been writing fiction for 50 years, since I was 19. And when you write fiction, it becomes a way of thinking: there's always a novel around. The strange thing was that after 'Remember Me,' there wasn't.”

“I only published my first novel at the age of 40. Till then, I wrote short stories.”

“I do want to say the process of writing a novel is riddled with self-doubt and self-loathing.”

“I started a second novel seven times and I had to throw them away.”

“The best project is one that asks a novel question.”

“I have nothing revolutionary or even novel to offer.”

“Life resembles a novel more often than novels resemble life.”

“There are three rules for writing a novel. Unfortunately, no one knows what they are.”

“I had begun to think that there might be something monumental here. A vague element of the mythical. The velocity of who we are. Every scrap of existence colliding inside the tubes: the weak force, the strong force, the theory of everything. And, of course, every inanity was whirling inside there too. All of it tumbling in unison along the sea floor.”

“And life? Life itself? Was it perhaps only an infection, a sickening of matter? Was that which one might call the original procreation of matter only a disease, a growth produced by morbid stimulation of the immaterial? The first step toward evil, toward desire and death, was taken precisely then, when there took place that first increase in the density of the spiritual, that pathologically luxuriant morbid growth, produced by the irritant of some unknown infiltration; this, in part pleasurable, in part a motion of self-defense, was the primeval stage of matter, the transition from the insubstantial to the substance. This was the Fall.”

“Novelists when they write novels tend to take an almost godlike attitude toward their subject, pretending to a total comprehension of the story, a man's life, which they can therefore recount as God Himself might, nothing standing between them and the naked truth, the entire story meaningful in every detail. I am as little able to do this as the novelist is, even though my story is more important to me than any novelist's is to him - for this is my story; it is the story of a man, not of an invented, or possible, or idealized, or otherwise absent figure, but of a unique being of flesh and blood, Yet, what a real living human being is made of seems to be less understood today than at any time before, and men - each one of whom represents a unique and valuable experiment on the part of nature - are therefore shot wholesale nowadays. If we were not something more than unique human beings, if each one of us could really be done away with once and for all by a single bullet, storytelling would lose all purpose. But every man is more than just himself; he also represents the unique, the very special and always significant and remarkable point at which the world's phenomena intersect, only once in this way and never again. That is why every man's story is important, eternal, sacred; that is why every man, as long as he lives and fulfills the will of nature, is wondrous, and worthy of every consideration. In each individual the spirit has become flesh, in each man the creation suffers, within each one a redeemer is nailed to the cross.”

“Isn't it funny how the memories you cherish before a breakup can become your worst enemies afterwards? The thoughts you loved to think about, the memories you wanted to hold up to the light and view from every angle--it suddenly seems a lot safer to lock them in a box, far from the light of day and throw away the key. It's not an act of bitterness. It's an act if self-preservation. It's not always a bad idea to stay behind the window and look out at life instead, is it?”

“...Love can give you the most exhilarating wonderful highs at times...”

“V-Day…if you need this one day in a year to show everyone else you truly care for “your loved one” I think it’s quite stupid. I hate this commercialism. It’s all artificial, and has nothing to do with real love.”

“My head’ll explode if I continue with this escapism.”

“I suppose it’s not a social norm, and not a manly thing to do — to feel, discuss feelings. So that’s what I’m giving the finger to. Social norms and stuff…what good are social norms, really? I think all they do is project a limited and harmful image of people. It thus impedes a broader social acceptance of what someone, or a group of people, might actually be like.”

“Please, touch me, I pray.”

“Maybe you could be mine / or maybe we’ll be entwined / aimless in this sexless foreplay.”

“وقتی زمان زیادی یک جا می مانی، فراموش می کنی دنیا چقدر وسیع است. هیچ درکی از اندازه ی واقعی نصف النهارها و مدارها پیدا نمی کنی، همان طور که سخت است درکی از وسعت درون هر انسانی داشته باشی. ولی وقتی وسعت را درک کنی، وقتی چیزی گستردگی انسان را به چشمت آشکار کند، امید سر بر می آورد، چه تو بخواهی چه نخواهی، و سرسختانه به تو می چسبد و رهایت نمی کند مثل خزه که صخره را رها نمی کند.”

“Berhentilah mencari laki-laki untuk membuatmu baagia.”

“Qu'est-ce que le roman, en effet, sinon cet univers où l'action trouve sa forme, où les mots de la fin sont prononcés, les êtres livrés aux êtres, où toute vie prend le visage du destin. Le monde romanesque n'est que la correction de ce monde-ci, suivant le désir profond de l'homme. Car il s'agit bien du même monde. La souffrance est la même, le mensonge et l'amour. Les héros ont notre langage, nos faiblesses, nos forces. Leur univers n'est ni plus beau ni plus édifiant que le nôtre. Mais eux, du moins, courent jusqu'au bout de leur destin, et il n'est même jamais de si bouleversants héros que ceux qui vont jusqu'à l'extrémité de leur passion.[...] Voici donc un monde imaginaire, mais créé par la correction de celui-ci, un monde où la douleur peut, si elle le veut, durer jusqu'à la mort, où les passions ne sont jamais distraites, où les êtres sont livrés à l'idée fixe et toujours présents les uns aux autres. L'homme s'y donne enfin à lui-même la forme et la limite apaisante qu'il poursuit en vain dans sa condition. Le roman fabrique du destin sur mesure. C'est ainsi qu'il concurrence la création et qu'il triomphe, provisoirement, de la mort.”

“When a Tralfamadorian sees a corpse, all he thinks is that the dead person is in bad condition in the particular moment, but that the same person is just fine in plenty of other moments. Now, when I myself hear that somebody is dead, I simply shrug and say what the Tralfamadorians say about dead people, which is "So it goes.”

“What I learned in this tragedy was the eternal lesson of good people going bad.”

“The novel is a formidable mass, and it is so amorphous - no mountain in it to climb, no Parnassus or Helicon, not even a Pisgah. It is most distinctly one of the moister areas of literature - irrigated by a hundred rills and occasionally degenerating into a swamp. I do not wonder that the poets despise it, though they sometimes find themselves in it by accident. And I am not surprised at the annoyance of the historians when by accident it finds itself among them.”

“Relate comic things in pompous fashion. Irregularity, in other words the unexpected, the surprising, the astonishing, are essential to and characteristic of beauty. Two fundamental literary qualities: supernaturalism and irony. The blend of the grotesque and the tragic are attractive to the mind, as is discord to blasé ears. Imagine a canvas for a lyrical, magical farce, for a pantomime, and translate it into a serious novel. Drown the whole thing in an abnormal, dreamy atmosphere, in the atmosphere of great days … the region of pure poetry.”

“Hi, my name is Marcos, I am a naturalized urban writer of Argentine nationality.”

“Misunderstanding and distrust—the predominant elements of a novel. Without them, everyone lives happily from beginning.”

“As we stood there, chest high in water, I felt like I was in the middle of my own romance novel.”

“Maybe if he read enough novels about the problems of fictional people, he might find some clue about how to solve his own.”

“It's gonna take me a lot longer than a year without you to get over you.”

“You try spending six months sitting at somebody's bedside, waiting for them to die and then tell me that the happy-ending love story isn't one of God's good gifts.”

“-I think you are inhuman. If I leave you, who will you go to? Would you find another lover?”

“Is there a difference between loving someone and being in love with someone?”

“Rough palms cradled my face while my fingers gripped the pillow on either side of his. Lips, teeth, tongue, mingled together. I ate him up and didn’t let go until I had to come up for air.”

“Starla and Conner ambled to his car, knowing each deliberate footstep meant the road to parting was nearer. He leaned his back against the door pulling her within inches of his face, their personal space evaporating like dew steeped in the warmth of the morning sun. She tilted her head sideways, searching his eyes with hers. Straightening the collar of his shirt she said, “If I’m too bold forgive me, but you fill a void in my life . . . you’re like finding that stray earring I’ve been trying to find for ages and now that I have, it scares me.”

“As a rule of thumb, it was always safer if the Commander-in-Chief formulated a risky plan.”

“Berhentilah mencari laki-laki untuk membuatmu baagia.”

“Well, well, well, look who’s here riding solo.”

“I noticed him right away. No, it wasn’t his lean, rugged face. Or the dark waves of shiny hair that hung just a little too long on his forehead. It wasn’t the slim, collarless biker jacket he wore, hugging his lean shoulders. It was the way he stood. The confident way he waited in the cafeteria line to get a slice of pizza. He didn’t saunter. He didn’t amble. He stood at the center, and let the other people buzz around him. His stance was straight and sure.”

“He’d used the amulet to read my thoughts again.”

“Vane’s lips tightened to suppress a smile. “Why so hostile, love?”

“I caught his hand. “What do you want me to do?”

“Vane grabbed me. “DuLac, let’s chat.”

“Do you think we can be friends?” I asked.”

“The human mind is not a dignified organ, and I do not see how we can exercise it sincerely except through eclecticism. And the only advice I would offer my fellow eclectics is: "Do not be proud of your inconsistency. It is a pity, it is a pity that we should be equipped like this. It is a pity that Man cannot be at the same time impressive and truthful.”

“The contract between the author and the reader is a game. And the game . . . is one of the greatest invetions of Western civilization: the game of telling stories, inventing characters, and creating the imaginary paradise of the individual, from whence no one can be expelled because, in a novel, no one owns the truth and everyone has the right to be heard and understood.”

“If she spoke, she would tell him the truth: she was not okay at all, but horribly empty, now that she knew what it was like to be filled.”

“…Справжні романи завжди трохи мудріші за їхніх авторів. Романісти, мудріші за власні твори, повинні поміняти професію.”