52 Novel Quotes

If you're a book lover, you know the power a single sentence from a great novel can hold. Literary quotes have the incredible ability to capture emotions, encapsulate deep truths, and resonate with our own life experiences in just a few words. In this piece, we've curated a collection of the top 52 novel quotes that stand out for their wisdom, poignancy, and the sheer beauty of language. Whether you’re looking for inspiration, a moment of reflection, or just a reminder of the magic that words can weave, dive into these unforgettable lines from some of the most cherished books ever written. Get ready to be moved, enlightened, and captivated.

1. “Up until then, whenever anyone had mentioned the possibility of making a film adaptation, my answer had always been, ‘No, I’m not interested.’ I believe that each reader creates his own film inside his head, gives faces to the characters, constructs every scene, hears the voices, smells the smells. And that is why, whenever a reader goes to see a film based on a novel that he likes, he leaves feeling disappointed, saying: ‘the book is so much better than the film.” - Paulo Coelho

2. “I came, I saw, I concurred...” - Darren E. Laws

3. “A story conducted by the time of a clock and calendars alone would be a story not of human beings but of mechanical toys.” - Mary Lascelles

4. “People wonder why the novel is the most popular form of literature; people wonder why it is read more than books of science or books of metaphysics. The reason is very simple; it is merely that the novel is more true than they are.” - G.K. Chesterton

5. “The novel is the one bright book of life. Books are not life. They are only tremulations on the ether. But the novel as a tremulation can make the whole man alive tremble.” - D. H. Lawrence

6. “and if a rainy morning deprived them of other enjoyments, they were still resolute in meeting in defiance of wet and dirt, and shut themselves up, to read novels together. Yes, novels; for I will not adopt that ungenerous and impolitic custom so common with novel–writers, of degrading by their contemptuous censure the very performances, to the number of which they are themselves adding — joining with their greatest enemies in bestowing the harshest epithets on such works, and scarcely ever permitting them to be read by their own heroine, who, if she accidentally take up a novel, is sure to turn over its insipid pages with disgust. Alas! If the heroine of one novel be not patronized by the heroine of another, from whom can she expect protection and regard? I cannot approve of it. Let us leave it to the reviewers to abuse such effusions of fancy at their leisure, and over every new novel to talk in threadbare strains of the trash with which the press now groans. Let us not desert one another; we are an injured body. Although our productions have afforded more extensive and unaffected pleasure than those of any other literary corporation in the world, no species of composition has been so much decried. From pride, ignorance, or fashion, our foes are almost as many as our readers. And while the abilities of the nine–hundredth abridger of the History of England, or of the man who collects and publishes in a volume some dozen lines of Milton, Pope, and Prior, with a paper from the Spectator, and a chapter from Sterne, are eulogized by a thousand pens — there seems almost a general wish of decrying the capacity and undervaluing the labour of the novelist, and of slighting the performances which have only genius, wit, and taste to recommend them. “I am no novel–reader — I seldom look into novels — Do not imagine that I often read novels — It is really very well for a novel.” Such is the common cant. “And what are you reading, Miss — ?” “Oh! It is only a novel!” replies the young lady, while she lays down her book with affected indifference, or momentary shame. “It is only Cecilia, or Camilla, or Belinda”; or, in short, only some work in which the greatest powers of the mind are displayed, in which the most thorough knowledge of human nature, the happiest delineation of its varieties, the liveliest effusions of wit and humour, are conveyed to the world in the best–chosen language. Now, had the same young lady been engaged with a volume of the Spectator, instead of such a work, how proudly would she have produced the book, and told its name; though the chances must be against her being occupied by any part of that voluminous publication, of which either the matter or manner would not disgust a young person of taste: the substance of its papers so often consisting in the statement of improbable circumstances, unnatural characters, and topics of conversation which no longer concern anyone living; and their language, too, frequently so coarse as to give no very favourable idea of the age that could endure it.” - Jane Austen

7. “Remember where you are and adjust yourself accordingly, not vice-versa ... otherwise, you might be toast.” - Alisa Dana Steinberg

8. “I read anything that’s going to be interesting. But you don’t know what it is until you’ve read it. Somewhere in a book on the history of false teeth there’ll be the making of a novel.” - Terry Pratchett

9. “Mental Note #50: The apple doesn't fall far from the tree, even though it most desperately wants to. - Notes from Ellen Wasserfeldman” - Alisa Dana Steinberg

10. “Life is painful and disappointing. It is useless, therefore, to write new realistic novels. We generally know where we stand in relation to reality and don’t care to know any more.” - Michel Houellebecq

11. “The best thing to do is to loosen my grip on my pen and let it go wandering about until it finds an entrance. There must be one – everything depends on the circumstances, a rule applicable as much to literary style as to life. Each word tugs another one along, one idea another, and that is how books, governments and revolutions are made – some even say that is how Nature created her species.” - Machado de Assis

12. “A short story is a love affair, a novel is a marriage. A short story is a photograph; a novel is a film.” - Lorrie Moore

13. “Novels are forged in passion, demand fidelity and commitment, often drive you to boredom or rage, sleep with you at night. They are the long haul. They are marriage. Stories, on the other hand, you can lose yourself in for a few weeks and then wrap up, or grow tired of and abandon and (maybe) return to later. They can cuddle you sweetly, or make you get on your knees and beg.” - David Leavitt

14. “The dull people decided years and years ago, as everyone knows, that novel-writing was the lowest species of literary exertion, and that novel reading was a dangerous luxury and an utter waste of time.” - Wilkie Collins

15. “I have almost completed a long novel, but it is unpublishable until my death and England's.” - E.M. Forster

16. “Formerly I believed books were made like this: a poet came, lightly opened his lips, and the inspired fool burst into song – if you please! But it seems, before they can launch a song, poets must tramp for days with callused feet, and the sluggish fish of the imagination flounders softly in the slush of the heart. And while, with twittering rhymes, they boil a broth of loves and nightingales, the tongueless street merely writhes for lack of something to shout or say” - Vladimir Vladimirovich Mayakovsky

17. “The stupidity of people comes from having an answer for everything. The wisdom of the novel comes from having a question for everything. When Don Quixote went out into the world, that world turned into a mystery before his eyes. That is the legacy of the first European novel to the entire subsequent history of the novel. The novelist teaches the reader to comprehend the world as a question. There is wisdom and tolerance in that attitude. In a world built on sacrosanct certainties the novel is dead. The totalitarian world, whether founded on Marx, Islam, or anything else, is a world of answers rather than questions. There, the novel has no place.” - Milan Kundera

18. “It is untrue that fiction is nonutilitarian. The uses of fiction are synonymous with the uses of literature. They include refreshment, clarification of life, self-awareness, expansion of our range of experiences, and enlargement of our sense of understanding and discovery, perception, intensification, expression, beauty , and understanding. Like literature generally, fiction is a form of discovery, perception, intensification, expression, beauty, and understanding. If it is all these things, the question of whether it is a legitimate use of time should not even arise.” - Leland Ryken

19. “A novel, in which all is created by the author's whim, must strike a more profound level of truth, or it is worthless.""And yet, I have heard you say that any novel that relieves your ennui for an hour has proved its usefulness.""You have a good memory. It must have been ten thousands of years ago that I uttered those words.""And if it was?""In another ten thousand, perhaps I will agree with them again.""In my opinion, the proper way to judge a novel is this: Does it give one an accurate reflection of the moods and characteristics of a particular group of people in a particular place at a particular time? If so, it has value. Otherwise, it has none.""You do not find this rather narrow?""Madam—""Well?""I was quoting you.” - Steven Brust

20. “Writing a novel is actually searching for victims. As I write I keep looking for casualties. The stories uncover the casualties."(Interview in Writers at Work: The Paris Review Interviews, Eighth Series, ed. George Plimpton, 1988)” - John Irving

21. “When I work, I'm just translating the world around me in what seems to be straightforward terms. For my readers, this is sometimes a vision that's not familiar. But I'm not trying to manipulate reality. This is just what I see and hear.” - Don DeLillo

22. “Life must not be a novel that is given to us, but one that is made by us. ” - Novalis

23. “What are American dry-goods? asked the duchess, raising her large hands in wonder and accentuating the verb.American novels, answered Lord Henry.” - Oscar Wilde

24. “Find the things that matter, and hold on to them, and fight for them, and refuse to let them go.” - Lauren Oliver

25. “Henry James said there isn't any difference between "the English novel" and "the American novel" since there are only two kinds of novels at all, the good and the bad.” - Eudora Welty

26. “Art, though, is never the voice of a country; it is an even more precious thing, the voice of the individual, doing its best to speak, not comfort of any sort, but truth. And the art that speaks it most unmistakably, most directly, most variously, most fully, is fiction; in particular, the novel.” - Eudora Welty

27. “‎"It almost felt like the dolphin of my heart’s desire playing in the ocean of my life." - on writing” - Mariam Kobras

28. “My brother Keith begged to go with us as usual. He'll turn thirteen in a few days - August 14 - and the thought of waiting two more years until he's 15 must seem impossible to him. I understand. Waiting is terrible. Waiting to be older is worse than other kinds of waiting because there's nothing you can do to make it happen faster.” - Octavia Butler

29. “The essentials," I answered, "are to learn to shape God with forethought, care, and work; to educate and benefit their community, their families, and themselves; and to contribute to the fulfillment of the Destiny.” - Octavia E. Butler

30. “When I die I hope it may be said:'Her suffering was black, but her books were read'.” - Shannon Alder

31. “We trust to novels to train us in the practice of great indignations and great generositie.” - Henry James

32. “Every novel is an attempt to capture time, to weave something solid out of air. The author knows it is an impossible task - that is why he keeps on trying.” - David Beaty

33. “He thought of trying to explain something he had recently noticed about himself: that if anyone insulted him, or one of his friends, he didn't really mind--or not much, anyway. Whereas if anyone insulted a novel, a story, a poem that he loved, something visceral and volcanic occurred within him. He wasn't sure what this might mean--except perhaps that he had got life and art mixed up, back to front, upside down.” - Julian Barnes

34. “If you only write when you’re inspired you may be a fairly decent poet, but you’ll never be a novelist because you’re going to have to make your word count today and those words aren’t going to wait for you whether you’re inspired or not.You have to write when you’re not inspired. And you have to write the scenes that don’t inspire you. And the weird thing is that six months later, a year later, you’ll look back at them and you can’t remember which scenes you wrote when you were inspired and which scenes you just wrote because they had to be written next.The process of writing can be magical. …Mostly it’s a process of putting one word after another.” - Neil Gaiman

35. “While art thrives on the blazing colours of scandal, literature blossoms on the dark soil of tragedy.” - E.A. Bucchianeri

36. “I’ve only been to jail a few times, but in several different countries, at that. No, I've only been to jail a few times. But I still claim the ability to write a "serious" novel.” - Roman Payne

37. “If you only write when inspired, you may be a fairly decent poet, but you'll never be a novelist.” - Neil Gaiman

38. “I ran across an excerpt today (in English translation) of some dialogue/narration from the modern popular writer, Paulo Coelho in his book: Aleph.(Note: bracketed text is mine.)... 'I spoke to three scholars,' [the character says 'at last.'] ...two of them said that, after death, the [sic (misprint, fault of the publisher)] just go to Paradise. The third one, though, told me to consult some verses from the Koran. [end quote]' ...I can see that he's excited. [narrator]' ...Now I have many positive things to say about Coelho: He is respectable, inspiring as a man, a truth-seeker, and an appealing writer; but one should hesitate to call him a 'literary' writer based on this quote. A 'literary' author knows that a character's excitement should be 'shown' in his or her dialogue and not in the narrator's commentary on it. Advice for Coelho: Remove the 'I can see that he's excited' sentence and show his excitement in the phrasing of his quote.(Now, in defense of Coelho, I am firmly of the opinion, having myself written plenty of prose that is flawed, that a novelist should be forgiven for slipping here and there.)Lastly, it appears that a belief in reincarnation is of great interest to Mr. Coelho ... Just think! He is a man who has achieved, (as Leonard Cohen would call it), 'a remote human possibility.' He has won lots of fame and tons of money. And yet, how his preoccupation with reincarnation—none other than an interest in being born again as somebody else—suggests that he is not happy!” - Roman Payne

39. “I like what I do. Some writers have said in print that they hated writing and it was just a chore and a burden. I certainly don't feel that way about it. Sometimes it's difficult. You know, you always have this image of the perfect thing which you can never achieve, but which you never stop trying to achieve. But I think ... that's your signpost and your guide. You'll never get there, but without it you won't get anywhere.[Interview with Oprah Winfrey, June 5, 2007]” - Cormac McCarthy

40. “After all, isn't the purpose of the novel, or of a museum, for that matter, to relate our memories with such sincerity as to transform individual happiness into a happiness all can share?” - Orhan Pamuk

41. “...a novel, like a myth or any great work of art, can become an initiation that helps us to make a painful rite of passage from one phase of life, one state of mind, to another. A novel, like a myth, teaches us to see the world differently; it shows us how to look into our own hearts and to see our world from a perspective that goes beyond our own self-interest.” - Karen Armstrong

42. “Kadang saat kita gak mampu melepaskan orang yang terlalu kita cintai, berarti kitalah yang harus pergi” - Nilam Suri Camar Biru

43. “هل تتساءل أنت عن شكل وجهي؟ هل تراه في وجوه النساء؟ أنت لا تسألني شيئا.. كأنك تريد فقط أن تتحدث إلى شخص تعرف أنه يحب الاستماع إليك، ثم تطلب منه أن يدعو لك، كأنني متسولة تتصدق علي بكلماتك ثم قبل أن ترحل تطلب مني أن أدعو لك.” - لطيفة الحاج

44. “قرأت مرة: يسهل على الرجل أن يحب المرأة التي تستمع له. أنا استمع لك كل الوقت، بكل حواسي، فهل سيأتي اليوم الذي تحبني فيه؟” - لطيفة الحاج

45. “What we can imagine we can make real” - Nadine May

46. “Sometimes you can write about a character's day in under a minute and sometimes it takes a day just to write about a minute.” - Jennifer v Clancy

47. “I write romance and passion to savour love twice, in the moment and in retrospect.” - Angeline M. Bishop

48. “If you cannot judge a book by its cover, surely we should not judge an author by one book alone?” - E.A. Bucchianeri

49. “Ruskin says that anyone who expects perfection from a work of art knows nothing of works of art. This is an appealing sentence that, so far as I can see, is not true about a few pictures and statues and pieces of music, short stories and short poems. Whether or not you expect perfection from them, you get it; at least, there is nothing in them that you would want changed. But what Ruskin says is true about novels: anyone who expects perfection from even the greatest novel knows nothing of novels.” - Randall Jarrell

50. “Life is'nt about getting everything you want the instant you want it.Some thing are worth waiting for.” - mira lyn kelly

51. “Marriage is a partnership, not a democracy.” - Nicholas Sparks

52. “There is much to discover that's not on the back cover!” - E.A. Bucchianeri