Best Novels Quotes to Inspire, Uplift & Motivate You Every Day

“I have almost completed a long novel, but it is unpublishable until my death and England's.”

“I only wrote prose before I met you.”

“If you only write when you’re inspired you may be a fairly decent poet, but you’ll never be a novelist because you’re going to have to make your word count today and those words aren’t going to wait for you whether you’re inspired or not.”

“Poetry, plays, novels, music, they are the cry of the human spirit trying to understand itself and make sense of our world.”

“The trees are bedecked with snow, the air is perfumed; how sweet, how dark the sultry fragrance. Forever hypnotising, always haunting. I want to inhale the fragrance of your skin, drink from your open mouth.”

“Ivanov: And this whole romance of ours is commonplace and trite: he lost heart, and he lost his way. She came along, strong and brave in spirit, and gave him an helping hand. That's all very well and plausible in novels, but in life...”

“Semua orang pernah patah hati. All you have to do is move on.”

“Marriage is a partnership, not a democracy.”

“A novel must show how the world truly is, how characters genuinely think, how events actually occur. A novel should somehow reveal the true source of our actions.”

“Faction is that hybrid of documented fact and novelistic elaboration.”

“I ran across an excerpt today (in English translation) of some dialogue/narration from the modern popular writer, Paulo Coelho in his book: Aleph.(Note: bracketed text is mine.)... 'I spoke to three scholars,' [the character says 'at last.'] ...two of them said that, after death, the [sic (misprint, fault of the publisher)] just go to Paradise. The third one, though, told me to consult some verses from the Koran. [end quote]' ...I can see that he's excited. [narrator]' ...Now I have many positive things to say about Coelho: He is respectable, inspiring as a man, a truth-seeker, and an appealing writer; but one should hesitate to call him a 'literary' writer based on this quote. A 'literary' author knows that a character's excitement should be 'shown' in his or her dialogue and not in the narrator's commentary on it. Advice for Coelho: Remove the 'I can see that he's excited' sentence and show his excitement in the phrasing of his quote.(Now, in defense of Coelho, I am firmly of the opinion, having myself written plenty of prose that is flawed, that a novelist should be forgiven for slipping here and there.)Lastly, it appears that a belief in reincarnation is of great interest to Mr. Coelho ... Just think! He is a man who has achieved, (as Leonard Cohen would call it), 'a remote human possibility.' He has won lots of fame and tons of money. And yet, how his preoccupation with reincarnation—none other than an interest in being born again as somebody else—suggests that he is not happy!”

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

“Writing fiction is the act of weaving a series of lies to arrive at a greater truth.”

“I'm not wise, but I read a lot of novels.”

“If there was any great lesson in life it was this: No battle was ever won with silence.”

“The moon will guide you through the night with her brightness, but she will always dwell in the darkness, in order to be seen.”

“A novel is never anything but a philosophy expressed in images. And in a good novel the philosophy has disappeared into the images.”

“It was only after two years' work that it occurred to me that I was a writer. I had no particular expectation that the novel would ever be published, because it was sort of a mess. It was only when I found myself writing things I didn't realise I knew that I said, 'I'm a writer now.' The novel had become an incentive to deeper thinking. That's really what writing is—an intense form of thought.”

“Some stories have to be written because no one would believe the absurdity of it all.”