Great Novels Quotes

• If you live to be a hundred, I want to live to be a hundred minus one day so I never have to live without you.

  A. A. Milne

  Love, Friendship, Birthday

  "Winnie-the-Pooh: The House at Pooh Corner". Book by A. A. Milne, 1928.

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• It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.

  Jane Austen

  Inspirational, Funny, Relationship

  Pride and Prejudice ch. 1 (1813)

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• FEAR IS THE MIND-KILLER. FEAR IS THE LITTLE-DEATH THAT BRINGS TOTAL OBLITERATION.

  Frank Herbert

  Fear, Fantasy Novels, Scary

  Frank Herbert (2003). “Dune”, p.203, Penguin

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• All that is gold does not glitter.

  J. R. R. Tolkien

  Being Strong, Travel, Fantasy Novels

  J.R.R. Tolkien (2012). “The Fellowship of the Ring: Being the First Part of The Lord of the Rings”, p.179, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• One must be just a little crazy to write a great novel. One must be capable of allowing the darkest, most ancient and shrewd parts of one’s being to take over the work from time to time.

  John Gardner

  Crazy, Writing, Littles

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• France lost a great novel last night.

  Victor Hugo

  Sex, Night, Lasts

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• It is my contention that a really great novel is made with a knife and not a pen. A novelist must have the intestinal fortitude to cut out even the most brilliant passage so long as it doesn't advance the story.

  Frank Yerby

  Writing, Cutting, Knives

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• A great novel is a kind of conversion experience. We come away from it changed.

  Katherine Paterson

  Book, Kind, Changed

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• Great novels are always a little more intelligent than their authors.

  Milan Kundera

  Intelligent, Littles, Novel

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• I'd like to emphasize that when a reader finishes a great novel, he will immediately begin looking for another. If someone loves your book, it increases the chance that he or she will look at mine. So there is no competition between writers. Another writer's success helps build a larger readership for all of us.

  David Farland

  Book, Competition, Looks

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• A good novel is one that shows the complexity of individuals, and creates enough space for all these characters to have a voice; in this way a novel is called democratic - not that it advocates democracy but that by nature it is so. Empathy lies at the heart of Gatsby, like so many other great novels - the biggest sin is to be blind to others' problems and pains. Not seeing them means denying their existence.

  Azar Nafisi

  Pain, Lying, Heart

  Azar Nafisi (2003). “Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books”, p.132, Random House

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• You don't read Gatsby, I said, to learn whether adultery is good or bad but to learn about how complicated issues such as adultery and fidelity and marriage are. A great novel heightens your senses and sensitivity to the complexities of life and of individuals, and prevents you from the self-righteousness that sees morality in fixed formulas about good and evil.

  Azar Nafisi

  Self, Issues, Evil

  Azar Nafisi (2003). “Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books”, p.133, Random House

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• I always seem to get inspiration and renewed vitality by contact with this great novel land of yours which sticks up out of the Atlantic.

  Winston Churchill

  Pregnancy, Inspiration, Land

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• The moment in which the narrator, reaching for his boots, becomes vividly and lastingly aware of the finality of his grandmother's death is another such moment. It would be interesting to explore Proust's great novel from the perspective of seeing how stable synthetic complexes are formed and modified.

  Philip Kitcher

  Grandmother, Interesting, Perspective

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• A great novel is worth one thousand films.

  Oscar Hijuelos

  Writing, Film, Novel

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• Good novels are not written, they are rewritten. Great novels are diamonds mined from layered rewrites.

  Piers Paul Read

  Novel, Diamond, Written

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• Empathy lies at the heart of Gatsby, like so many other great novels-the biggest sin is to be blind to others problems and pains. Not seeing them means denying their existence.

  Azar Nafisi

  Pain, Lying, Heart

  Azar Nafisi (2003). “Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books”, p.132, Random House

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• Few of us write great novels; all of us live them.

  Mignon McLaughlin

  Life, Writing, Novel

  Mignon McLaughlin (2014). “Aperçus: The Aphorisms of Mignon McLaughlin”, p.87, BookBaby

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• My notion of a great novel is something like a five-hundred-page shaggy-dog story, with only the punch line omitted.

  Edward Abbey

  Dog, Stories, Lines

  Edward Abbey (2015). “A Voice Crying in the Wilderness”, p.34, RosettaBooks

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• 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.

  John Tesh

  Writing, Thinking, Risk

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• All the great novels, all the great films, all the great dramas are fictions that actually tell us the truth about us or about human nature or about human situations without being tied into the minutia of documentary events. Otherwise we might as well just make documentaries.

  Jeremy Northam

  Drama, Events, Fiction

  Biography/Personal Quotes, www.imdb.com.

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• The light that radiates from the great novels time can never dim, for human existence is perpetually being forgotten by man and thus the novelists' discoveries, however old they may be, will never cease to astonish.

  Milan Kundera

  Men, Light, Discovery

  The Guardian, June 3, 1988.

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• The really great novel tends to be the exact negative of its author's life.

  Andre Maurois

  Writing, Negative, Novel

  "The Art of Writing". Book by Andre Maurois, 1960.

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• As a precocious teen I dreamed of being Graham Greene. Well, as it turned out, I never wrote a great novel, sadly, and I never converted to Catholicism, happily, but I did do one thing he did. That is, in middle age I moved to a seaside town and got into a right barney with the local powers-that-be.

  Julie Burchill

  Age, Towns, Middle

  Julie Burchill, Daniel Raven (2007). “Made in Brighton: From the Grand to the Gutter: Modern Britain as Seen from Beside the Sea”, Virgin Books Limited

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• They say great themes make great novels. but what these young writers don't understand is that there is no greater theme than men and women.

  John O'Hara

  Men, Young Writers, Theme

  John O'Hara (1977). “"An artist is his own fault": John O'Hara on writers and writing”, Southern Illinois University

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