"It is only a novel... or, in short, only some work in which the greatest powers of the mind are displayed, in which the most thorough knowledge of human nature, the happiest delineation of its varieties, the liveliest effusions of wit and humour, are conveyed to the world in the best-chosen language"
— Jane Austen (Northanger Abbey)

"Romance novels are birthday cake and life is often peanut butter and jelly. I think everyone should have lots of delicious romance novels lying around for those times when the peanut butter of life gets stuck to the roof of your mouth."
— Janet Evanovich

"I’d said it before and meant it: Alive or undead, the love of my life was a badass."
— Richelle Mead (Blood Promise)

"Okay, God, I thought. Get me out of this and I’ll stop my half-assed churchgoing ways(...)Let me get out of here, and I’ll . . . I don’t know. Donate Adrian’s money to the poor. Get baptized. Join a convent. Well, no. Not that last one. "
— Richelle Mead (Blood Promise)

"to forgive or not to forgive... are those my only choices?"
— Natsuki Takaya

"People wonder why the novel is the most popular form of literature; people wonder why it is read more than books of science or books of metaphysics. The reason is very simple; it is merely that the novel is more true than they are."
— G.K. Chesterton

"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."
— Sven Birkerts (The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age)

"None of you understand. I'm not locked up in here with YOU. You're locked up in here with ME."
— Alan Moore (Watchmen)

"Writing fiction is the act of weaving a series of lies to arrive at a greater truth."
— Khalid Hosseini

"Sweet n spicy, tasty n nasty wife,
Pull her near and enjoy your life.
As you sow, so you reap
And others sow, never peep.
Oho, never peep, Aha, never peep.
Hui, hui, never peep. "
— G.J Bajaj

"I came, I saw, I concurred..."
— Darren E. Laws (Turtle Island)

"In the post-Warhol era a single gesture such as uncrossing one's legs will have more significance than all the pages in WAR AND PEACE."
— J.G. Ballard (The Atrocity Exhibition)

"Poetry, plays, novels, music, they are the cry of the human spirit trying to understand itself and make sense of our world."
— Laura Malone Elliott (Annie, Between the States)

"And all the lives we ever lived and all the lives to be, are full of trees and changing leaves"
— Virginia Woolf

"'What are American dry-goods?' asked the duchess, raising her large hands in wonder and accentuating the verb.

'American novels,' answered Lord Henry."
— Oscar Wilde (The Picture of Dorian Gray and Other Writings)

"I now understand that writing fiction was a seed planted in my soul, though I would not be ready to grow that seed for a long time."
— Sue Monk Kidd (Traveling with Pomegranates: A Mother-Daughter Story)

"The person, be it gentleman or lady, who has not pleasure in a good novel, must be intolerably stupid."
— Jane Austen (Northanger Abbey)

"The stupidity of people comes from having an answer for everything. The wisdom of the novel comes from having a question for everything....The novelist teaches the reader to comprehend the world as a question. There is wisdom and tolerance in that attitude. In a world built on sacrosanct certainties the novel is dead. The totalitarian world, whether founded on Marx, Islam, or anything else, is a world of answers rather than questions. There, the novel has no place."
— Milan Kundera (The Book of Laughter and Forgetting)

"The novel is the one bright book of life. Books are not life. They are only tremulations on the ether. But the novel as a tremulation can make the whole man alive tremble."
— D.H. Lawrence

"No one says a novel has to be one thing. It can be anything it wants to be, a vaudeville show, the six o’clock news, the mumblings of wild men saddled with demons."
— Ishmael Reed

"He shivered. His coat was thin, and it was obvious he would not get his kiss, which he found puzzling. The manly heroes of the penny dreadfuls and shilling novels never had these problems getting kissed."
— Neil Gaiman (Stardust)

"When I want to read a novel, I write one."
— Benjamin Disraeli

"Life must not be a novel that is given to us, but one that is made by us. "
— Novalis (Novalis: Philosophical Writings)

" Confession time: I doubt I would ever have picked up one of Marjorie’s books, had I not met her in person. The reason is they’re categorized as Romances, which is where they are shelved in bookstores. Though I have no justification for avoiding it, the romance section is an area in bookstores I seldom wander into. Her novels also have traditional-looking romance book covers, which are occasionally a bit off-putting to us mighty manly men.

Then again, who knows? I don’t carry many biases where good storytelling is concerned. I’m willing to find it anywhere, as too many of my friends will attest, when I try to drag them to wonderful movies that they aren’t eager to go to, simply because they fall under the chick-flick rubric. So, in any case, I’m glad I did meet Marjorie Liu in person, because it would have been a shame to miss out on the work of an author this talented due to whatever degree of cultural prejudices I might still possess. I trust you who read this won’t make the same mistake. "
— Bill Willingham

"There are three rules for writing the novel. Unfortunately, no one knows what they are."
— W. Somerset Maugham

"After reading Edgar Allan Poe. Something the critics have not noticed: a new literary world pointing to the literature of the 20th Century. Scientific miracles, fables on the pattern A+ B, a clear-sighted, sickly literature. No more poetry but analytic fantasy. Something monomaniacal. Things playing a more important part than people; love giving away to deductions and other forms of ideas, style, subject and interest. The basis of the novel transferred from the heart to the head, from the passion to the idea, from the drama to the denouement."
— Jules De Goncourt (Journal des Goncourt, tome 2)

"I like shape very much. A novel has to have shape, and life doesn't have any. "
— Jean Rhys (Smile Please: An Unfinished Autobiography)

"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."
— Michel Houellebecq (H. P. Lovecraft: Against the World, Against Life)

"A story conducted by the time of a clock and calendars alone would be a story not of human beings but of mechanical toys."
— Mary Lascelles (Jane Austen and Her Art)

"Severely burned - hr skirt caught on fire - Leonie Lefevre - 10, of Saint Maur, died in Trousseau "
— Felix Feneon

"A novel is a garden carried in the pocket."
— Arabian proverb

"One did not drink sherry before the evening, just as one did not read a novel in the morning."
— Barbara Pym, Quartet in Autumn

"America is now wholly given over to a damned mob of scribbling women, and I should have no chance of success while the public taste is occupied with their trash."
— Nathaniel Hawthorne

"It is practically an axiom in psychiatry that precocious intellect combined with physical weakness can give rise to many unpleasant character traits - avarice, delusions of grandeur , and obsessive masturbation, to name just a few. "
— Sam Savage (Firmin: Adventures of a Metropolitan Lowlife)

"The best thing to do is to loosen my grip on my pen and let it go wandering about until it finds an entrance. There must be one – everything depends on the circumstances, a rule applicable as much to literary style as to life. Each word tugs another one along, one idea another, and that is how books, governments and revolutions are made – some even say that is how Nature created her species."
— Machado de Assis

"he best thing to do is to loosen my grip on my pen and let it go wandering about until it finds an entrance. There must be one – everything depends on the circumstances, a rule applicable as much to literary style as to life. Each word tugs another one along, one idea another, and that is how books, governments and revolutions are made – some even say that is how Nature created her species."
— Machado de Assis