W. Somerset Maugham
Novelist, Playwright
"I would sooner read a time-table or a catalogue than nothing at all. They are much more entertaining than half the novels that are written."
Novel quotes
Novel
483 quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
Robert Hughes
Art Critic, Author
"Landscape is to American painting what sex and psychoanalysis are to the American novel."
Stan Lee
Comic Book Writer, Editor
"Comics are stories; they're like novels or anything else. So the first thing you have to do is become a good storyteller."
John Steinbeck
Novelist, Journalist
"We only have one story. All novels, all poetry are built on the never-ending contest in ourselves of good and evil."
Lewis Baltz
Photographer
"The photobook occupies that deep area between the novel and the film."
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Novel quotes (page 1 of 25)
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"You never learn how to write a novel. You just learn how to write the novel that you're writing."
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"All great novels, all true novels, are bisexual."
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"I read novels but I also read the Bible. And study it, you know? And the more I learn, the more excited I get."
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"The devil is always discovering something novel against the truth."
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"Any man's life, told truly, is a novel."
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"There're no novels that I like to read so I write my own novels, and then I read them again, and it's the best thing."
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"A novel is balanced between a few true impressions and the multitude of false ones that make up most of what we call life."
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"I wonder if we are all wrong about each other, if we are just composing unwritten novels about the people we meet?"
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"I wrote my first novel because I wanted to read it."
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"Anthropological fieldwork is so much like writing a novel. You don't know what the hell is going on."
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"I do not know what to say in a case so surprising, so unlooked for and so novel."
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"I never plan my novels because if I know what is going to happen, it bores me rigid. I let the story tell itself."
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"I'm skeptical that the novel will be 're-invented.'"
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"I find that in a novel I can get more of life, perhaps not such intense life, but certainly more of life than in poetry."
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"If I had the luxury of working as a full time writer, I think you would see novels appearing on a much more regular, and frequent, basis."
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"I suppose I have written novels to find out what I thought about something and poems to find out what I felt about something."
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"We can't behave like people in novels, though, can we?"
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"Travelling is like a novel: it's what happens that counts."
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"Every novel is an ideal plane inserted into the realm of reality."
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"It's with bad sentiments that one makes good novels."
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