Novel Appreciation Quotes

Ford Maddox Ford's 'The Good Soldier' is my favourite novel. I first read it in the 1950s and have read it about 20 times since. It's possibly the best-constructed book in the English language.

I've always loved Jane Austen's writing.

I mainly read histories and biographies, but I'm also a big fan of Graham Swift and Thomas Hardy.

I'm reading 'Ten Storey Love Song' by Richard Milward. I read his first novel, 'Apples,' after hearing a reading of his in the Hague. I really enjoyed it, so I've started this one.

I am re-reading Henry James as a change from history. I began with Daisy Miller, and I've just finished Washington Square. What a brilliant, painful book.

I like Victorian children's novels extremely a lot. If I would say I collect anything, that's what I'll hunt for now and again at old book stores.

I would like my novels to be read the way I read the novels I love.

'Bleak House' remains a great novel for me, and I love 'David Copperfield.'

When I get asked about novelists I like, they tend to be white, male, and British, like Graham Greene. They write the kind of declarative sentences I like. I don't like to be deflected by acrobatics.

The person, be it gentleman or lady, who has not pleasure in a good novel, must be intolerably stupid.

When I read a novel that I really like, I feel as if I am in direct, personal communication with the author. I feel as if the author and I are on the same wavelength mentally, that we have a lot in common with each other, and that we could have an interesting conversation, or even a friendship, if the circumstances permitted it. When the novel comes to an end, I feel a certain letdown, a loss of contact. It is natural to want to recapture that feeling by reading other works by the same author, or by corresponding with him/her directly.

I've read 'Valley of the Dolls' at least four times. It's so epic!

The love of novels is the preference of sentiment to the senses.

Many fantasy novels - 'Lord of the Rings', for instance, or 'Lavondyss' by Robert Holdstock - are beautifully written. Geoff Ryman's 'The Child Garden' is exquisite and utterly beguiling. Mervyn Peake's 'Gormenghast' trilogy is an astonishing piece of multi-faceted storytelling. So quality of writing does not condemn the genre.

I love to read. And right now I'm on my last hundred pages of 'The Corrections' by Jonathan Franzen, and I really enjoyed it. His writing is just - he's one of those writers where you just go, 'There are people just meant to be novel writers.'

He brought his great hand to rest on an early edition of Bram Stoker's novel and smiled, but said nothing. Then he moved quietly away into another section.

A fascinating book and a great pleasure to read: Betool Khedairi is a talented new voice in fiction.

You can't not like 'The Great Gatsby.' It's got the best sentences in, like, ever.

One of my favourite books when I was young was 'Wuthering Heights.'

I never read a novel, they have so little real life and thought in them.

I love everything that Cormac McCarthy has written.

God, I just love 'A Journey to the End of the Millennium,' by A. B. Yehoshua. My favorite novel by an American Jew is probably 'Humboldt's Gift.'

This Is Not a Novel memorializes the treasures and detritus of one man's singularly cultured mind. (...) If you don't know Writer's work at all, try This Is Not a Novel. There may be some doubt about exactly what kind of book it is, but not that it's altogether wonderful.

The dull people decided years and years ago, as everyone knows, that novel-writing was the lowest species of literary exertion, and that novel reading was a dangerous luxury and an utter waste of time.

Novels seem to me to be richer, broader, deeper, more enjoyable than poems.