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.

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

A great novel is worth one thousand films.

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

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.

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

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.

There is always something of the writer in the work but I don't think Melville had to be swallowed by a whale to write a great novel. If I had lived the lives of all the characters of the songs I've written, that would truly be an extraordinary story.

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.

They say great themes make great novels

A scrupulous man will never produce a great novel.

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.

the great novels have marched with the years. They are the contemporaries of time.

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

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.

France lost a great novel last night.

Suppose there were an experience machine that would give you any experience you desired. Superduper neuropsychologists could stimulate your brain so that you would think and feel you were writing a great novel, or making a friend, or reading an interesting book. All the time you would be floating in a tank, with electrodes attached to your brain. Should you plug into this machine for life, preprogramming your life experiences?...Of course, while in the tank you won't know that you're there; you'll think that it's all actually happening...Would you plug in?

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.

All great novels are great fairy tales.

As much as I revere great writing, and am still humbled by it, literary activities are no longer esoteric to me. When I read a great novel - something that I could never have written myself - I'm still looking at it a little bit like a technician.

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.

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.

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

Just as we bemoan the passing away of the Great Novel, a great novelist is likely to emerge, perhaps even from Denmark or Switzerland, to prove us wrong.

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

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.

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.

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.

Sometimes, as in a great novel, you cannot see until you get to the end that God was leaving clues for you all along.

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

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.

Some of my youthful readers are developing wonderful imaginations. This pleases me. 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. For aside from my evident inability to do anything "great," I have learned to regard fame as a will-o-the-wisp which, when caught, is not worth the possession; but to please a child is a sweet and lovely thing that warms one's heart and brings its own reward.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

All great novels, all true novels, are bisexual.

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

Whether it's Mrs Dalloway's lost love or Thérèse Raquin's burgeoning horror, The Paying Guests reminds us of every great novel we've gasped or winced at, or loudly urged the protagonists through, and it does not relent. . . . The Paying Guests is the apotheosis of [Waters'] talent; at least for now. I have tried and failed to find a single negative thing to say about it. Her next will probably be even better. Until then, read it, Flaubert, Zola, and weep.

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.

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.

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.

All that is gold does not glitter.

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.

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.

I was in Los Angeles making 'Dead Again' and the producer, Lindsay Doran , asked me if I'd be interested in adapting this book, .. Austen is my favorite author and I thought, 'Well, of course, I'd be very interested, but I don't know how. I don't know where to start, A, writing a screenplay and B, sort of adapting it from a great novel.

Virginia Woolf's great novel, 'Mrs. Dalloway,' is the first great book I ever read. I read it almost by accident when I was in high school, when I was 15 years old.

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.

I read Susanna Clarke's Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, which I think will subsequently be recognized as one of the first great novels of the 21st century.