492 Quotes About Novels

The attraction of reading is that it allows you to live, for a few hours, as someone else—grants you access to their head, their thoughts, their secrets.

I often find that a novel, even a well-written and compelling novel, can become a blur to me soon after I've finished reading it. I recollect perfectly the feeling of reading it, the mood I occupied, but I am less sure about the narrative details. It is almost as if the book were, as Wittgenstein said of his propositions, a ladder to be climbed and then discarded after it has served its purpose.

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

There is much to discover that's not on the back cover!

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.

If you only write when inspired, you may be a fairly decent poet, but you'll never be a novelist.

When I want to read a novel, I write one.

She wrote novels on paper napkins. Sometimes she scribbled on newspapers that the men in suits left behind and made her own poetry with the crossword templates on the back. She wouldn’t make a penny writing. If anything, she was losing pennies. That’s why they trust her art. Her poor, dirty, beautiful art.

Artists hide their identities in the brushstrokes of their paintings, the verses in their cantos, and the sentences in their novels. The true face of an artist is never on his face and this is what he prefers. Others misunderstand this displaced melancholy with an absence of melancholy.