Great Novels Quotes

At Oxford University, I studied languages so I could read the great novels as they were originally written. I took what in the United States would be a double major in Russian and French, but I have to admit that the pressure of getting through so many books spoiled reading for me. ~ Kate Beckinsale

A great novel is worth one thousand films. ~ Oscar Hijuelos

I also once heard that if you have enough good ideas for three or four great novels, then what you probably have is actually enough ideas for one good one. That has stayed with me. ~ Darren White

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

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

Well, the medium of film is so different than a book that just by bringing it into visual storytelling is to change it up. I think in a book, in any book, you can have a reactive character. Some of the great novels of all time have had that, but in a film you can't do that. ~ Melissa Rosenberg

I went into journalism in a grandiose way. I thought maybe I'd do a little journalism whilst I write the great novel of all time you see
one has to keep oneself afloat. ~ Neal Ascherson

[A] great novel will allow you to transcend the social, racial and political limitations imposed by the vicissitudes of life and to find a deep fraternity based on empathy. ~ Azar Nafisi

When I was young I longed to write a great novel that should win me fame. Now that I am getting old my first book is written to amuse children ~ L. Frank Baum

In every great novel, who is the hero all the time? Not any of the characters, but some unnamed and nameless flame behind them all. ~ D.H. Lawrence

I haven't the stature to critique one of our literature's great novels, Tobias; and I'm not one of those who believe The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn needs critiquing for literary or social reasons. ~ Norman Lock

Great novels are above all great fairy tales ... literature does not tell the truth but makes it up. ~ Vladimir Nabokov

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

All great novels, all true novels, are bisexual. ~ Milan Kundera

Few of us write great novels; all of us live them. ~ Mignon McLaughlin

Good novels are not written, they are rewritten. Great novels are diamonds mined from layered rewrites. ~ Piers Paul Read

A great novel is concerned primarily with the interior lives of its characters as they respond to the inconvenient narratives that fate imposes on them. Movie adaptations of these monumental fictions often fail because they become mere exercises in interior decoration. ~ Richard Schickel

I think literature has lost it's power. Great novels continue to be written, but they are no longer changing the world. ~ Don DeLillo

One of the things that I love about writing novels is that it really doesn't matter what next step you take as long as you're pursuing some intuition or instinct. Of course, then, intuitions or instincts don't make for great novels, but they often make for good first drafts. ~ Jonathan Safran Foer

A scrupulous man will never produce a great novel. ~ Julien Green

If a novel reveals true and vivid relationships, it is a moral work, no matter what the relationships consist in. If the novelisthonours the relationship in itself, it will be a great novel. ~ D.H. Lawrence

Don't be afraid of what others may think. Your creativity belongs to you, your inspiration, your imagination is all yours. Be passionate and write with fire in your words. Allow no boundaries to what you feel and believe. The spark that drives you to write is the fuel for your desire to create great novels. Know that you have the spirit within. ~ Sheila Renee Parker

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

Middlemarch is a novel that is diminished by being put on the screen. It can't help but be, because so much of what we enjoy in Middlemarch is the interplay between what the characters do and what we know about them because of the telling voice.

It's less of a problem for the cinema when it deals with novels that are purely concerned with action and what people do. I haven't thought this through, and I'm just trying it now to see what it sounds like. But maybe it would be less a problem with novels that are told in the first person. The interesting thing to me about Middlemarch, and Thackeray's Vanity Fair, and several other great novels, is precisely this omniscient, as we call it, third person, which naive readers mistake for the author. It isn't George Eliot who is saying this; it's a voice that George Eliot adopts to tell this story.

There can be something very interesting in a novel like Bleak House, which was also done very well on the television by the same adapter, Andrew Davis. Now, Bleak House is told in two voices, as you remember. One is the somewhat trying Esther Summerson, who is a paradigm of every kind of virtue, and the other is a different sort of voice entirely, a voice that tells the story in the present tense, which was unusual for the time, a voice that doesn't seem to have a main character attached to it.

But I think that Dickens is playing a very subtle game here. I've noticed a couple of things about that second narrat ~ Philip Pullman

The great novels have marched with the years. They are the contemporaries of time. ~ Ellen Glasgow

I have no desire to write historical anything or futuristic anything - I want to find a way to get at the essence of what it's like to be alive now. The reason why great novels from centuries ago are still great is because that's what they were doing; it's like a message from another culture. ~ Jonathan Dee

A novel is a kind of conversion experience. We come away from it changed. ~ Katherine Paterson

All great novels are great fairy tales. ~ Vladimir Nabokov

I had 'Push' and 'The Paperboy' next to my bed for many years. Those are some of the great, great novels. ~ Lee Daniels

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

The rise of the dramas in the thirteenth century, and the rise of the great novels in a later period, together with their frank glorification of love and the joys of life, may be called the Third Renaissance. ~ Hu Shih

I'm grateful for the likes of Kundera, Murnane, Markson, Berger, and, in his recent work, Coetzee. But no matter how celebrated they are, critics still consider them askance. Elizabeth Costello, for example, is a great novel, but it got quite a critical panning when it was published. The complaint was that it was simply a book of speeches, without the machinery of conventional fiction. Markson's books are compilations of facts and alleged facts, very artfully. ~ Teju Cole

Kato's expression shifts into something I could almost call a smile for the first time since I found him. He plucks the chordsagain in the beginnings of a tune I recognize, a ballad popular in southern Sinta. His fingers move with skill and subtlety over the strings. I had no idea he was musical.

"Maybe we're not meant to kill it." He keeps playing. "Doesn't music soothe the beast? I'll play, you sing."

"I sound like a strangled Satyr when I sing."

He smiles. "Somehow that doesn't surprise me."

"There's no need for mudslinging," I say with a huff.

He chuckles softly. "I can carry a tune."

"Great!" I pat his arm. "That'll be your job. I'll stand back - waaaaay back - while you calm the beast. I'm confident you'll sound as good as you look."

His chest puffs out. "How do I look?"

"Terrible." I grin. "You needed a bath, a shave, and a comb before we even set foot on the Ice Plains. Now, I can just barely make out your eyes and your nose. The rest is all" - I flap my hands around - "hair."

His chest deflates. He eyes me wryly. "I could say the same about you."

I gasp. "I grew a beard? Do you think Griffin will like it? I've been trying to keep it neat, but I may have picked up an eel."

Kato laughs outright, and he really is unbearably handsome. Some of the grimness evaporates from his eyes. "I was talking about this." He gives one of my tousled waves a light tug ~ Amanda Bouchet

No one ever expects a great lay to pay all the bills. ~ Jean Harlow

Tonight was a great opportunity to take on the political status quo that has given us trillion dollar deficits and put millions out of work. Our objective was to inject some common sense into the conversation among Republicans at a time when business-as-usual simply won't work. ~ Gary Johnson

This great question of predestination and free will, of free moral agency and accountability, and being saved by the grace of God, and damned for the glory of God, have occupied the mind of what we call the civilized world for many centuries. ~ Robert Green Ingersoll

Life is a great adventure, darling, and problems are nothing more than opportunities to show what you can do. Show them, darling. You are young and beautiful and full of imagination. ~ Kerstin Gier

Love is great, but not as a password. ~ Matt Mullenweg

I had the great idea of using markers to gently color the ants so I could tell them apart, but I learned that this is exactly like somebody trying to gently color on you with a thirty-story building.
Without dwelling on the tragedy, I'd just like to say that I'm deeply sorry to Mr. Purple and the surviving Purple family. ~ Jim Benton

At a conference of sociologists in America in 1977, love was defined as "the cognitive-affective state characterized by intrusive and obsessive fantasizing concerning reciprocity of amorant feelings by the object of the amorance." That is jargon - the practice of never calling a spade a spade when you might instead call it a manual earth-restructuring implement - and it is one of the great curses of modern English. ~ Bill Bryson

Before everything else, getting ready is the secret of success. ~ Henry Ford

We are just now learning what Sir Albert Howard said so long ago, that the whole problem of health, and soil, and plants, and animals, and humanity is one great subject. ~ Jeremy Seifert

The transept belfry and the two towers were to him three great cages, the birds in which, taught by him, would sing for him alone. Yet it was these same bells which had made him deaf; but mothers are often fondest of the child who has made them suffer most. ~ Victor Hugo

How come you don't work fourteen hours a day? Your great-great-grandparents did. How come you only work the eight-hour day? Four guys got hanged fighting for the eight-hour day for you. ~ Studs Terkel

The day of the great jazz improviser who doesn't know how to read music is over. ~ Maynard Ferguson

That's where everything starts, as an actor: you've gotta have great writing and great character development, and then you have really great materials to work from. ~ Matt Lauria

As a child, I lived through and survived the segregated South. I sat at the back of the bus at a time when America wasn't yet as great as it could be. ~ Donna Brazile

The photographic image has great possibilities. The magical photograph attempts to go beyond the immediate context of the recorded experience into the realm of the indefinable. The photographer as magician is acutely aware of the multiplicity of associations submerged in the appearance of the objective world. ~ Arthur Tress

Love and I once had a great relationship, but I fear we've broken up. It cheated on me, wrecked my heart, and then went on to date other people. A lot of other people. And I can't stand to watch it, since love's going to cheat on them too. ~ David Levithan

I think of Pope Gregory the Great. He wanted the cloister. He wanted to pray and study, and yet he was thrust into this administrative job, and he submitted to that. And in that submission, he became a great leader. You could say that the only person who is safe to lead is the person who is free to submit. ~ Richard Foster

A great percentage of the mistakes I discovered in
my own work, could be attributed to testimonies. ~ Raul Hilberg

I got four volumes of the letters and speeches of Oliver Cromwell. He is prominent among the great unread, and treated so oddly by history that I wanted to hear his side of things. ~ Marilynne Robinson

There are many women who came before me who didn't really have the same opportunities that I have had. That's why I always wanted to be a great ambassador - not only today's generation - but for the women who really didn't have a voice, but who paved the way for me. ~ Jackie Joyner-Kersee

The great secret of getting what you want from life is to know whay you want and believe you can have it. Always do something for others, then ask God to help you get at it. ~ Norman Vincent Peale

Here is the blackness of space, the myriad stars gleaming like diamond dust or, as some people would say, like great balls of exploding hydrogen a very long way off. But then, some people would say anything. A ~ Terry Pratchett

A tree's shade is worth more than the knowledge of truth, my sons, for a tree's shade is true while it lasts, and the knowledge of truth is false in its very truth. The leaves' greenness is worth more, for a right understanding, than a great thought, for the leaves, greenness is something you can show others, but you can never show them a great thought. We are born without knowing how to talk and we die without having known how to express ourselves. Our life runs its course between the silence of one who cannot speak and the silence of one who wasn't understood, and around it hovers - like a bee where there are no flowers - a useless, inscrutable destiny. ~ Fernando Pessoa

In a crisis, stocks of financial companies are great investments, because the tide is bound to turn. Massive losses on bad loans and soured investments are irrelevant to value; improving trends and future prospects are what matter, regardless of whether profits will have to be used to cover loan losses and equity shortfalls for years to come. ~ Seth Klarman

Regional interests and loyalties are even stronger among Australians than among Americans - in that in social life they exist almost without challenge. Canberra is a poor thing compared to Washington and there is no great metropolis like New York that sets many of the nation's trends. There is no generally acknowledged central city where the important things are believed to happen and it seems better to be. ~ Donald Horne

Take the famous slogan on the atheist bus in London … "There's probably no God. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life." … The word that offends against realism here is "enjoy." I'm sorry - enjoy your life? Enjoy your life? I'm not making some kind of neo-puritan objection to enjoyment. Enjoyment is lovely. Enjoyment is great. The more enjoyment the better. But enjoyment is one emotion … Only sometimes, when you're being lucky, will you stand in a relationship to what's happening to you where you'll gaze at it with warm, approving satisfaction. The rest of the time, you'll be busy feeling hope, boredom, curiosity, anxiety, irritation, fear, joy, bewilderment, hate, tenderness, despair, relief, exhaustion … This really is a bizarre category error.
But not necessarily an innocent one … The implication of the bus slogan is that enjoyment would be your natural state if you weren't being "worried" by us believer … Take away the malignant threat of God-talk, and you would revert to continuous pleasure, under cloudless skies. What's so wrong with this, apart from it being total bollocks?
… Suppose, as the atheist bus goes by, that you are the fifty-something woman with the Tesco bags, trudging home to find out whether your dementing lover has smeared the walls of the flat with her own shit again. Yesterday when she did it, you hit her, and she mewled till her face was a mess of tears and mucus which you also had to clean up. The only thing that would ease the weight on you ~ Francis Spufford

Need-love cries to God from our poverty; Gift-love longs to serve, or even to suffer for, God; Appreciative love says: "We give thanks to thee for thy great glory." Need-love says of a woman "I cannot live without her"; Gift-love longs to give her happiness, comfort, protection – if possible, wealth; Appreciative love gazes and holds its breath and is silent, rejoices that such a wonder should exist even if not for him, will not be wholly dejected by losing her, would rather have it so than never to have seen her at all." p.17 ~ C.S. Lewis

Novels should be judged rigorously. Either a book works or it doesn't. The fact that something is true in the real world should not lend authority to it in fiction. ~ Akhil Sharma

Our present ecological crisis, the biggest single practical threat to our human existence in the middle to long term, has, religious people would say, a great deal to do with our failure to think of the world as existing in relation to the mystery of God, not just as a huge warehouse of stuff to be used for our convenience. ~ Rowan Williams

The great unity which true science seeks is found only by beginning with our knowledge of God, and coming down from Him along the stream of causation to every fact and event that affects us. ~ Howard Crosby

Terror is an artery.
Running unfailing channels of bloodied thoroughfares by dint of the wilds beyond our knowing. Fluctuations and murmurs are audible within the splintered leeway of our preserve as a consequence of interstices modeled in such brutality. This appended artery offers no direction; idle and at times desultory. Bloodstained tracks and avenues guide casualties.
Terror, like death, is not complicated, nor is it simple. It is but routine - natural. To call it otherwise is to parsimoniously say that birth is effortless, hurricanes are facile, and earthquakes are meek when they are a lot more.
Myths, parables, and allegories lie in the construct of terror. Kings have fallen and succeeded in the yarns of terror. Simple men have been turned into heroes due to terror. Villains have been great orchestrators in the art of terror, allowing sole individuals and denizens to feel their makings. A soul never needed God to feel terror. The most nihilistic can undergo such a dreadful emotion. Animals are perfect examples of this. They are well-equipped creations to the world of terror and death, holding no cognizance to deity or creator.
Terror is quite exclusive as it is a function of the mind, conducted by the intersections and throughways of nerves and bounded to that alone. Although it approaches with university, like hunger or sickness, it is selfish by fashion and segregating in nature. But death is quite opposite… death is all embracing. Disregarded ~ J.C. Whitfield

The household was pervaded by this atmosphere of a calm adult woman and a man who gave into animal impulses. She reported to him in great detail what her analyst ... said about his binges and his hostility; she used Charley's money to pay Dr. Andrews to catalog his abnormalities. And of course Charley never heard anything directly from the doctor; he had no way of keeping her from reporting what served her and holding back what did not. The doctor, too, had no way of getting to the truth of what she told him; no doubt she only gave him the facts that suited her picture, so that the doctor's picture of Charley was based on what she wanted him to know. By the time she had edited both going and coming there was little of it outside her control. ~ Philip K. Dick

The Bassbone works great in the studio or on the live stage. Throw it in your gig bag and take it wherever you go. ~ Victor Wooten

The thing about hiding out like this was that it did get boring, every once in a while. It occurred to Gabby to wonder if possibly she was missing something great. For all her bravado, it bothered her sometimes, that she couldn't make herself do what seemed to come so naturally to everyone else. ~ Katie Cotugno

Tragedy and comedy are simply questions of value; a little misfit in life makes us laugh; a great one is tragedy and cause for expression of grief. ~ Elbert Hubbard

A very great vision is needed, and the man who has it must follow it as the eagle seeks the deepest blue of the sky. ~ Crazy Horse

We are the bees of the invisible. We gather the honey of the visible, and store it in the great golden honeycomb of the invisible. ~ Rainer Maria Rilke