Long novels written today are perhaps a contradiction: the dimension of time has been shattered, we cannot love or think except in fragments of time each of which goes off along its own trajectory and immediately disappears. - Italo Calvino
What was Dr. Mera's motive for murder? I don't need to tell that to a writer of detective novels such as yourself. You know well enough yourself that even without a motive, a murderer lives to kill. - Rampo Edogawa
The best part of the fiction in many novels is the notice that the characters are imaginary. - Franklin P. Adams
In crime books it's possible to chart forensic technology by how well it has to be explained to a reader. In mid-Victorian crime novels fingerprinting has to be explained because it's new. Nowadays it's part of our world and we can simply assume that knowledge if we write about it. - Sara Sheridan
Romance novels are birthday cake and life is often peanut butter and jelly. I think everyone should have lots of delicious romance novels lying around for those times when the peanut butter of life gets stuck to the roof of your mouth. - Janet Evanovich
Novels for me are how I find out what's going on in my own head. And so that's a really useful and indeed critical thing to do when you do as many of these other things as I do. - Cory Doctorow
Half the point in reading novels and seeing plays and films is to exercise the faculty of sympathy with our own kind, so often obliterated in the multifarious controls and compulsions of actual social existence. - Germaine Greer
The English novels are the only relaxation of the intellectually unemployed. But one should not be too severe on them. They show a want of knowledge that must be the result of years of study. - Oscar Wilde
All humanity is passion; without passion, religion, history, novels, art would be ineffectual. - Honore De Balzac
At least half the mystery novels published violate the law that the solution, once revealed, must seem to be inevitable. - Raymond Chandler
I think that novels that leave out technology misrepresent life as badly as Victorians misrepresented life by leaving out sex. - Kurt Vonnegut
Who says only long tedious novels are good to read when all that can be summed up in one line - Priyansh Shah
Film and novel characters are often stereotyped, but racial stereotyping in many novels or films creates & encourages labelling, discrimination & racism. ~ - Angelica Hopes
When you think about the period in which Agatha Christie's crime novels were written, they are actually quite edgy for the time. - Sara Sheridan
Writers of novels live in a strange world where what's made up is as important as what's real. - Sara Sheridan
The truth is that every true admirer of the novels cherishes the happy thought that he alone - reading between the lines - has become the secret friend of their author. - Katherine Mansfield
We don't read novels to have an experience like life. Heck, we're living lives, complete with all the incompleteness. We turn to fiction to have an author assure us that it means something. - Orson Scott Card
Build your novel one word at a time. Remember that minutes = novels. - Mercedes M. Yardley
We read novels because we want to see the world through other experiences, other beings, other eyes, other cultures. - Orhan Pamuk
I could write novels about her forever. Maybe when I die I will end up in the poem with her writing more poems about our times together. The Diary - Jeremy Limn
It is quite possible--overwhelmingly probable, one might guess--that we will always learn more about human life and personality from novels than from scientific psychology - Noam Chomsky
The best part of the fiction in many novels is the notice that the characters are purely imaginary. - Franklin P. Adams
Most of my novels were developped from dreams I had. A dreamer I AM! Literally , at 1 AM. A dream with 140 characters is to dream an impossible dream. Too many characters to develoo from it. But in twitter that worked just fine for me, - Ana Claudia Antunes
I could hardly wait for following chapters, which arrived in dribs and drabs, and I began to feel for all the world like the young T.B. Macaulay walking from London to meet the Cambridge coach bearing the next installment of Waverley novels. - Vernon Sproxton
The whole world's writing novels, but nobody's reading them. We need readers. More readers. Fewer writers. - Robert Galbraith
History was my favourite subject at school and in my spare time I read historical novels voraciously from Heidi to the Scarlet Pimpernel and from Georgette Heyer to Agatha Christie. - Sara Sheridan
Miss Austen’s novels … seem to me vulgar in tone, sterile in artistic invention, imprisoned in the wretched conventions of English society, without genius, wit, or knowledge of the world. Never was life so pinched and narrow. The one problem in the mind of the writer … is marriageableness. - Ralph Waldo Emerson
Art is not like other culture because its success is not made by its audience. The public fill concert halls and cinemas every day, we read novels by the millions, and buy records by the billions. 'We the people'--affect the making and quality of most of our culture, but not our art. - Banksy
People without hope not only don't write novels, but what is more to the point, they don't read them. - Flannery O'Connor
Since I became a novelist I have discovered that I am biased. Either I think a new novel is worse than mine and I don’t like it, or I suspect it is better than my novels and I don’t like it. - Umberto Eco
If a writer writes poems and short stories and novels, but nobody ever reads them, is she really a writer? - Jennifer Weiner
...my novels are like life - I never know where they're going until I get to the end... - John Geddes
Gentleman: An imaginary creature found in Jane Austen novels. - Natalya Vorobyova
Every author really wants to have letters printed in the paper. Unable to make the grade, he drops down a rung of the ladder and writes novels. - P.G. Wodehouse
Great novels are above all great fairy tales . . . literature does not tell the truth but makes it up. - Vladimir Nabokov
Bad books on writing tell you to "WRITE WHAT YOU KNOW", a solemn and totally false adage that is the reason there exist so many mediocre novels about English professors contemplating adultery. - Joe Haldeman
All the great novels are about obsession and people who are obsessed. - Marty Rubin
All novels are sequels; influence is bliss. - Michael Chabon
Writers don't get mad they get even in their novels. - Candace C. Bowen
Novels give you the matrix of emotions, give you the flavour of a time in a way formal history cannot. - Doris Lessing
There is a chest inside my heart, where a magical world is hidden. With my novels, I hand to you the key to that world. - P. J. Mann
When God is driven to the periphery of the public square, the human spiritual capacity longs for exercise, and it often finds it in the suspension of disbelief and activity of the imagination that are available in novels and movies. - John Granger
Sex does not thrive on monotony. Without feeling, inventions, moods,no surprises in bed. Sex must be mixed with tears, laughter, words, promises, scenes, jealousy, envy, all the spices of fear, foreign travel, new faces, novels, stories, dreams, fantasies, music, dancing, opium, wine. - Anaïs Nin
The rustic, the reader of novels, the pure ascetic: these three are truly happy men - Fernando Pessoa
I don't write fantasy; I write historical novels about an imaginary place. - Raymond E. Feist
Novels are forged in passion, demand fidelity and commitment, often drive you to boredom or rage, sleep with you at night. - David Leavitt
Ideas take root at the oddest moments. Some grow into novels, the weaker ones wither and die. - Pippa DaCosta
Ultimately, culture, secular and otherwise, is a collection of survival strategies. The things that look like decoration—poetry, novels, music, dancing—if you strip away all the layers, are mechanisms for coping, surviving, understanding. - Ben Fountain
I think after all I found a feature which is incredible and kind of mein or let's say it something which is part of my childhood in the Jack Ketchum Novels and films. - Deyth Banger
The characters in my novels are my own unrealised possibilities. That is why I am equally fond of them all and equally horrified by them. Each one has crossed a border that I myself have circumvented. - Milan Kundera
Writing my own novels in the '90s...I never imagined that in ten years, science and rationality would require explanation and defense in a world rocked and ruled by religious fervor. - Mary Doria Russell
Read history, works of truth, not novels and romances - Robert E. Lee
No matter how troubled a character's history, romance novels tell us, love can be built upon it, and happily-ever-after can result. What's more, the darker the past, the brighter the future - and the better the read. - Sarah MacLean
Great novels are always a little more intelligent than their authors. - Milan Kundera
Some people claim that it is okay to read trashy novels because sometimes you can find something valuable in them. You can also find a crust of bread in a garbage can, if you search long enough, but there is a better way. - Jim Rohn
I do believe that characters in novels belong to their writers and their readers pretty equally. I've learned a lot of things about the characters I write from people who read about them. Readers expand them in ways I don't think of and take them to places I can't go. - Ann Brashares
Novels are readOr their authors are blue.Support Indie writers:Buy their books, post reviews! - Cheri Gillard
Do not start me on The Da Vinci Code ... a novel so bad that it gives bad novels a bad name."(Discussion at Woodruff Auditorium in Lawrence, KS; October 7, 2005.) - Salman Rushdie
And in my novels I live many lives. Substitutes of spontaneity to replace a dreary reality. How I live for those inky black words and kaleidoscope colored experiences. - Hubert Martin
I’m sure there are people who are content to run errands and report for work on time and wait, with an enlivening eagerness, for the lunch bell. I wish them well. They have, however, never been the subjects of novels, and in all likelihood, will never be. - Michael Cunningham
Good novels are not written by orthodoxy-sniffers, nor by people who are conscience-stricken about their own orthodoxy. Good novels are written by people who are not frightened. - George Orwell
Novels are just very, very, very long lies. That is to say, you’ve got to get your story straight! - Blair Thornburgh
Some children were lucky enough to have their Potter novels banned by witch-hunting school boards and micromanaging ministers. Is there any greater job than a book you're not allowed to read, a book you could go to hell for reading? - Ann Patchett
You write once and you can call yourself a writer, but it takes three novels before you can call yourself a novelist. The first two could have just been lucky. One day, I will finish my third, and one day, I will be a novelist. - Michael Kroft
You can’t write novels without a touch of paranoia. I’m paranoid as an act of good citizenship, concerned about what the powerful people are up to. - Kurt Vonnegut
If the novels are still being read in 50 years, no one is ever going to say: ‘What’s great about that sixth book is that he met his deadline!’ It will be about how the whole thing stands up. - George R.R. Martin
Anyone who is going to be a writer knows enough at fifteen to write several novels. - May Sarton
No, she laughed." How on earth could that be done? If you try to laugh and say ‘No’ at the same time, it sounds like neighing — yet people are perpetually doing it in novels. If they did it in real life they would be locked up. - Hilaire Belloc
The best horror novels open up, "It was beautiful summer day and the smell of flowers emanated throughout the air. - Justin Alcala
Perfect people make for boring novels. - HL Balcomb
Life doesn't change when you meet a guy and life doesn't fall apart when you break up with one. We are teaching young female readers the wrong things through books not only expressing this point, but also using these two concepts as turning plot points of novels. - Meghan Blistinsky
You'll want to read books - novels, because ladies are frivolous; poetry because ladies are sentimental; and sermons, because we are pious. If you must read essays, Mr. Emerson might be best. Your gentleman may have a nodding acquaintance with his works. - Donald McCaig