It seems to me that good novels celebrate the mystery in ordinary life, and summing it all up in psychological terms strips the mystery away.
Anne Tyler

It's with bad sentiments that one makes good novels.
Aldous Huxley

Life resembles a novel more often than novels resemble life.
George Sand

Love is more pleasant than marriage for the same reason that novels are more amusing than history.
Nicolas Chamfort

Many of the comedies I had made in Sweden were slightly based on semi-autobiographical experiences, so adapting novels was a very different experience.
Lasse Hallstrom

Most publishers seem very reluctant to publish short story collections at all; they bring them out in paperback, often disguised as novels.
John Sladek

Movies have to handle time very efficiently. They're about stringing scenes together in the present. Novels aren't necessarily about that.
Richard Russo

My dream remains to inform and entertain through fiction in the form of novels and movies that compete in the marketplace of ideas.
Jerry B. Jenkins

My novels aren't really generated by a single conceptual spark; it's more a process of many different elements that come together unexpectedly over a long period of time.
Donna Tartt

My second book, Follow Me Down had some success, got good critical notices, went into a second printing and things like that, but Shiloh was by far the most successful of those first five novels.
Shelby Foote

Novels are longer than life.
Natalie Clifford Barney

Novels are the Socratic dialogues of our time. Practical wisdom fled from school wisdom into this liberal form.
Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel

Novels for me are how I find out what's going on in my own head. And so that's a really useful and indeed critical thing to do when you do as many of these other things as I do.
Cory Doctorow

Novels tend to end as the Paternoster begins: with the kingdom of God on earth.
Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel

Of the first seven novels I wrote, numbers four and five were published. Numbers one, two, three, six, and seven, have never seen the light of day... and rightly so.
Sue Grafton

On that other novels followed: but I still wrote fairy tales and dreamy poems of another world.
Laurence Housman

Others, amounting to four novels and a mess of short stories which I did not think worth preserving, I have done my best to eliminate from the record by refusing all requests for permission to reprint them, and I hope I have done a good job of making them hard to unearth.
Leslie Charteris

Perhaps, all writers walk such a line. In general - as we all do in our dreams - I believe I put something of myself into all the characters in my novels, male as well as female.
Rose Tremain

Sex is. There is nothing more to be done about it. Sex builds no roads, writes no novels and sex certainly gives no meaning to anything in life but itself.
Gore Vidal

So, in some ways, the political songs tend to be a bit more like reportage, whereas the love songs tend to be like novels, you can pick them up off the shelf and go into them any time.
Billy Bragg