Quotes About Novel

Special qualities are required of the essayist. A poem or a novel may spring from the inner consciousness of an author. Reasoning poers must be brought to reinforce imagination.

Every novel is an attempt to capture time, to weave something solid out of air. The author knows it is an impossible task - that is why he keeps on trying.

To reflect the entire spectrum, the dynamics of the adventure novel must be invested with a philosophic synthesis of one kind or another.

Fiction is most effective when its themes are unspoken. An ideal fiction has a kind of thematic ghostliness, whereby the novel marks its meanings most strongly as it passes, as it disappears, rather as on a street snow gets dirtier, more marked, as it disappears.

Publishers, readers, booksellers, even critics, acclaim the novel that one can deliciously sink into, forget oneself in, the novel that returns us to the innocence of childhood or the dream of the cartoon, the novel of a thousand confections and no unwanted significance. What becomes harder to find, and lonelier to defend, is the idea of the novel as—in Ford Madox Ford's words—a "medium of profoundly serious investigation into the human case.

Beware: I'm unafraid to host a big spoiler party--a novel that can be truly "spoiled" by the summary of its plot is a novel that was already spoiled by that plot.

Even the apparently unreliable narrator is more often than not reliably unreliable. Think of Kazuo Ishiguro's butler in The Remains of the Day, or of Bertie Wooster, or even of Humbert Humbert. We know that the narrator is being unreliable because the author is alerting us, through reliable manipulation, to that narrator's unreliability. A process of authorial flagging is going on; the novel teaches us how to read its narrator. Unreliably

Let us leave it to the reviewers to abuse such effusions of fancy at their leisure, and over every new novel to talk in threadbare strains of the trash with which the press now groans. Let us not desert one another; we are an injured body.

"Only a novel"… 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 humor are conveyed to the world in the best chosen language.

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

Only a novel"... 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.

M. Jacques Rivière appears to know no Russian and says no words of 'aspects', but what he explains as his meaning is simply this, that the Russian novel is written in the imperfective, written from within not without, lived not thought about. This modern Russian method is to M. Rivière the exact opposite of symbolist work, where everything is known beforehand, everything achieved then thought or felt about from outside and above.

Somehow, knowing that Alzheimer's is coming mocks all one's aspirations - to tell stories, to think through certain issues as only a novel can do, to be recognised for one's accomplishments and hard work - in a way that old familiar death does not.

When a novel has 200 000 words, then it is possible for the reader to experience 200 000 delights, and to turn back to the first page of the book and experience them all over again, perhaps more intensely.

The novel integrates several forms of human intelligence - verbal intelligence (for the style), psychological intelligence (for the characters), logical intelligence (for the plot), spatial intelligence (for the symbolic and metaphorical content as well as the setting), and even musical intelligence (for pacing and rhythm.

The novel as a form is usually seen to be moral if its readers consider freedom, individuality, democracy, privacy, social connection, tolerance and hope to be morally good, but it is not considered moral if the highest values of a society are adherence to rules and traditional mores, the maintenance of hierarchical relationships, and absolute ideas of right and wrong. Any society based on the latter will find novels inherently immoral and subversive.

A certain pleasure was added to Grace's relief at establishing herself as a migratory bird. She found that she understood the characters in her novel. Her words flowed, she was excited, she could see everyone and everything.

I want to gather up all the ink cartridges in the universe, because somewhere, mixed in with all that ink, is the next great American novel. And I'd love nothing more than to drink it.

Governments and fashions come and go but Jane Eyre is for all time.

Lo que pasó es lo de menos. Es una novela, y lo que ocurre en ellas da lo mismo y se olvida, una vez terminadas. Lo interesante son las posibilidades e ideas que nos inoculan y traen a través de sus casos imaginarios, se nos quedan con mayor nitidez que los sucesos reales y los tenemos más en cuenta.

The historian will tell you what happened. The Novelist will tell you what it felt like. And the historical fiction writer does both!

I am thus led to the proposition that there is no fiction or nonfiction as we commonly understand the distinction: there is only narrative...A novel is a printed circuit through which flows the force of a reader's own life.

He took [the book] up, and found himself plunged in an atmosphere unlike any he had ever breathed in books; so warm, so rich, and yet so ineffably tender, that it gave a new and haunting beauty to the most elementary of human passions.