Quotes on Novel

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.

I decided I would put off the novel until I had gone to Europe and had a lover, and that I would never learn a word of shorthand. If I never learned shorthand I would never have to use it.

I'm going to marry my novels and have little short stories for children.

Any man's life, told truly, is a novel.

Of all the words of mice and men, the saddest are, "It might have been.

If I'm reading something I happen to know and gets it wrong, I just don't trust the book any more. What I ask of a novel I'm reading is that it should know a fraction more about the things I know than I do. When I'm writing...I ask myself: would I be convinced by this if I read it? If I knocked against this bit of scenery, would it feel solid?

All novels are sequels; influence is bliss.

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.

To have her meals, and her daily walk, and her fill of novels, and to be left alone, was all that she asked of the gods.

This is why I read novels: so I can escape my own unrelenting monologue.

These are all novels, all about people that never existed, the people that read them it makes them unhappy with their own lives. Makes them want to live in other ways they can never really be.

He was a guy who talked with commas, like a heavy novel. Over the phone anyway.

A novel seemed the easiest way to get what I had had in my head into the inside of other people's heads. Books are good that way.