The Novel Quotes

Anna Arkadyevna read and understood, but it was distasteful to her to read, that is, to follow the reflection of other people's lives. She had too great a desire to live herself. If she read that the heroine of the novel was nursing a sick man, she longed to move with noiseless steps about the room of a sick man; if she read of a member of Parliament making a speech, she longed to be delivering the speech; if she read of how Lady Mary had ridden after the hounds, and had provoked her sister-in-law, and had surprised everyone by her boldness, she too wished to be doing the same. But there was no chance of doing anything; and twisting the smooth paper knife in her little hands, she forced herself to read. ~ Leo Tolstoy

I read Claire Messud's 'The Emperor's Children,' I read Joseph O'Neill's 'Netherland' - but to me, they're not 9/11 novels. In 'The Emperor's Children,' 9/11 felt to me like a piece of the plot; the novel wasn't wrestling with what 9/11 meant. And 'Netherland' felt the same way. I liked both books a lot but I don't see them as 9/11 novels. ~ Amy Waldman

If we think of the novel and the epic ... The difference lies in the fact that the important thing about the epic is a hero
a man who is a pattern for all men. While, as Mencken pointed out, the essence of most novels lies in the breaking down of a man, in the degeneration of character. ~ Jorge Luis Borges

The novel is the highest example of subtle interrelatedness that man has discovered. ~ D.H. Lawrence

Much has been made about the death of the novel and the end of literature as it's seen to be assailed by technology, by the web, by the many and varied new forms of entertainment and culture. I don't share that pessimism because I think it is one of the great inventions of the human spirit. ~ Richard Flanagan

As always with the greatest works, the novel is so many-sided that over time it mirrors back the shifting concerns of those who read it, and that is the definition of a classic. ~ Carl F. Hovde

If a theme or idea is too near the surface, the novel becomes simply a tract illustrating an idea. ~ Elizabeth Bowen

I kept starting 'Anansi Boys' as a movie and stopping, and eventually wrote the novel and was happy. ~ Neil Gaiman

I believe that the short story is as different a form from the novel as poetry is, and the best stories seem to me to be perhaps closer in spirit to poetry than to novels. ~ Tobias Wolff

Naturalness onstage is just as much an artifice as naturalism in the novel ~ Julian Barnes

Now, as a reader, you shouldn't feel the decisions the writer makes about this DNA, or it would be boring beyond belief. But, as a writer, you're struggling to make these decisions. What should the title be? What's the first line? The point of view? And the struggle with the decisions is because you're trying to figure out WHAT IS THE NOVEL, WHAT IS THE NOVEL? ~ Mary Kay Zuravleff

Yes sir. You can be more careless, you can put more trash in [a novel] and be excused for it. In a short story that's next to the poem, almost every word has got to be almost exactly right. In the novel you can be careless but in the short story you can't. I mean by that the good short stories like Chekhov wrote. That's why I rate that second - it's because it demands a nearer absolute exactitude. You have less room to be slovenly and careless. There's less room in it for trash. ~ William Faulkner

I feel that whatever virtues the novel may have are very much connected with the limitations you mention. I am not writing a conventional novel, and I think that the quality of the novel I write will derive precisely from the peculiarity or aloneness, if you will, of the experience I write from. ~ Flannery O'Connor

Life, as the most ancient of all metaphors insists, is a journey; and the travel book, in its deceptive simulation of the journey's fits and starts, rehearses life's own fragmentation. More even than the novel, it embraces the contingency of things. ~ Jonathan Raban

The stories we read in books, what's presented to us as being interesting - they have very little to do with real life as it's lived today. I'm not talking about straight-up escapism, your vampires, serial killers, codes hidden in paintings, and so on. I mean so-called serious literature. A boy goes hunting with his emotionally volatile father, a bereaved woman befriends an asylum seeker, a composer with a rare neurological disorder walks around New York, thinking about the nature of art. People looking back over their lives, people having revelations, people discovering meaning. Meaning, that's the big thing. The way these books have it, you trip over a rock you'll find some hidden meaning waiting there. Everyone's constantly on the verge of some soul-shaking transformation. And it's - if you'll forgive my language - it's bullshit. Modern people live in a state of distraction. They go from one distraction to the next, and that's how they like it. They don't transform, they don't stop to smell the roses, they don't sit around recollecting long passages of their childhood - Jesus, I can hardly remember what I was doing two days ago. My point is, people aren't waiting to be restored to some ineffable moment. They're not looking for meaning. That whole idea of the novel - that's finished. ~ Paul Murray

To me, 'The End of the Jews' - both the title and the novel itself - is about the end of pat, uncritical ways of understanding oneself in the world. ~ Adam Mansbach

What I couldn't help noticing was that I learned more about the novel in a morning by trying to write a page of one than I'd learned in seven years or so of trying to write criticism. ~ Philip Pullman

Elisabeth Sheffield's new novel is multilayered, smart, beautifully written, and funny. I was taken in by the first paragraph and held firmly through the roller coaster of a ride. The depth of the novel was evidenced by the constantly shifting meaning of the title itself. In fact, the entire work never changes its meaning, but somehow, seamlessly, simply means more. This is a rare and memorable piece of work. ~ Percival Everett

In order to make the novel into a polyhistorical illumination of existence, you need to master the technique of ellipsis, the art of condensation. Otherwise, you fall into the trap of endless length. ~ Milan Kundera

The novel is apparently autobiographical and is being publicised as such but Doust has done with his material what so many autobiographical novelists fail to do: he has turned it into a shapely story, with no extraneous material or diversions and with an absolutely consistent and convincing narrative voice.' - Sydney Morning Herald ~ Jon Doust

Anthony Powell taught me to write; he has such brilliant control of the mechanics of the novel. ~ Alan Furst

The novel has always been a contradictory form. Here is a long form narrative mainly read originally by consumers who were only newly literate or limited in their literacy. The novel ranked below poetry, essay and history in prestige for a long time. ~ Matthew Pearl

Konstantin Tsiolkovsky in Russia, Hermann Olberth in Germany, and Robert Goddard in the United States all came up with an eerily similar concept for using liquid fuel to power rockets for human spaceflight. I've seen this pointed out as an odd coincidence, one of those moments when an idea inexplicably emerges in multiple places at once. But when I read through each of these three men's biographies I discovered why they all had the same idea: all three of them were obsessed with Jules Verne's 1865 novel "De la terre a la lune (From the Earth to the Moon)." The novel details the strange adventures of three space explorers who travel to the moon together. What sets Verne's book apart from the other speculative fiction of the time was his careful attention to the physics involved in space travel -- his characters take pains to explain to each other exactly how and why each concept would work. All three real-life scientists -- the Russian, the German, and the American -- were following what they had learned from a French science fiction writer. ~ Margaret Lazarus Dean

The novel puts an ad in the personals:
Serial monogamist seeks same.
6x9, 220 pages. Hobbies: candlelit
tension, tasteful gore. Weakness:
occasional flashbacks. Enjoys long
walks on the beach to search for
bodies washing up on shore. ~ Erin Murphy

Every once in a while I feel the tremendous force of the novel. But it does not stay with me. ~ Zane Grey

For me, the novel is experience illumined by imagination ... ~ Ellen Glasgow

If the proper audience for poetry is God, then the proper audience for the novel is people. Plays have both stories and poetry. Therefore the proper audience for plays is: people and God. But: what is the audience for poetry in a godless universe? The audience for poetry in a godless universe is the academy. Or perhaps: other poets and therefore God? And what is the proper audience for plays in a godless universe? Is there no proper audience for plays in a godless universe? Must we invent our own gods? ~ Sarah Ruhl

What 'War and Peace' is to the novel and 'Hamlet' is to the theater, Swan Lake' is to ballet - that is, the name which to many people stands for and sums up an art form. ~ Robert Gottlieb

If the novel is dying, I see no chance that dismembering it will revive it. ~ Storm Jameson

The novel does not say, it shows; it shows me my life in a figure: it compels me to stare at my toes. ~ William H. Gass

I read a blog about this young filmmaker in the Philippines who made a short film, and one of the characters in the film reads my novel and then starts discussing the novel with someone. The idea that my book can inspire another artist and be part of that other artist's work ... that's the reason I write. ~ Miguel Syjuco

Hotel Du Lac
Edith, once again anonymous, and accepting her anonymity, made an appropriately inconspicuous exit. And, sitting in the deserted salon, the first to arrive from the dining room, she felt her precarious dignity hard-pressed and about to succumb in the light of her earlier sadness. The pianist, sitting down to play, gave her a brief nod. She nodded back, and thought how limited her means of expression had become: nodding to the pianist or to Mme de Bonneuil, listening to Mrs Pusey, using a disguised voice in the novel she was writing and, with all of this, waiting for a voice that remained silent, hearing very little that meant anything to her at all. The dread implications of this condition made her blink her eyes and vow to be brave, to do better, not to give way. But it was not easy. ~ Anita Brookner

I sort of hate the novel when it doesn't push, restlessly, against the tradition and the traditional. ~ Rick Moody

The main thing about the novel that is totally fascinating: It's not possessed by the writer; it's possessed by the reader. ~ Jane Smiley

The power of literature, I've always thought, lies in how willful the act of making it is. As such, I've never bought into the idea that the writer requires any special ritual in order to write. If need be, I could write almost anywhere, as easily in an ashram as in a crowded cafe, or so I've always insisted when asked whether I write with a pen or a computer, at morning or night, alone or surrounded, in a saddle like Goethe, standing like Hemingway, lying down like Twain, and so on, as if there were a secret to it all that might spring the lock of the safe housing the novel, fully formed and ready for publication, apparently suspended in each of us. ~ Nicole Krauss

In the novel we can know people perfectly, and, apart from the general pleasure of reading, we can find here a compensation for their dimness in life. ~ E. M. Forster

Reading honest literature makes you love the world. Knowledge and understanding are love. Reading educates our feelings and enhances our sympathy. When you read for understanding, you are fundamentally changed. You are a different person at the end of the story or the novel than you were when it began. ~ John Dufresne

All novels are about certain minorities: the individual is a minority. The universal in the novel-and isn't that what we're all clamoring for these days?-is reached only through the depiction of the specific man in a specific circumstance. ~ Ralph Ellison

Between Malraux, Balzac, and Montaigne, I choose Montaigne. Montaigne will survive all the others, because the essay, meaning direct communication between the writer and his reader, will outlast the novel, by at least a thousand years. ~ Gore Vidal

The novel used to feed our search for meaning. Quoting Bill. It was the great secular transcendence. The Latin mass of language, character, occasional new truth. But our desperation has led us toward something larger and darker. So we turn to the news, which provides an unremitting mood of catastrophe. This is where we find emotional experience not available elsewhere. We don't need the novel. Quoting Bill. We don't even need catastrophes, necessarily. We only need the reports and predictions and warnings. ~ Don DeLillo

The novel moves like all the arts. It's transforming itself all the time. ~ Nathalie Sarraute

I resist when someone calls me a novelist: it implies some kind of inherent superiority of the novel. I'm not a novelist, I'm a writer. ~ Aleksandar Hemon

I am a man and alive. For this reason I am a novelist. And, being a novelist, I consider myself superior to the saint, te scientist, the philosopher, and the poet, who are all great masters of different bits of man alive, but never get the whole hog ... Only in the novel are all things given full play. ~ D.H. Lawrence

The Australian Gerald Murnane, a genius on the level of Beckett, is known in Australia and Sweden but almost nowhere else. And I loved Reality Hunger, David Shields' recent novel take on the art of the novel. ~ Teju Cole

I pretty much drink a cup of coffee, write in my journal for a while, and then sit at a computer in my office and torture the keys. My one saving grace as a writer is that, if I'm having trouble with the novel I'm writing, I write something else, a poem or a short story. I try to avoid writer's block by always writing something. ~ Jess Walter

What does the novel do? It tells beautiful, shapely lies which enclose hard, exact truths. ~ Julian Barnes

The novel may stimulate you to think. It may satisfy your aesthetic sense. It may arouse your moral emotions. But if it does not entertain you it is a bad novel. ~ W. Somerset Maugham

ROMANCE, n. Fiction that owes no allegiance to the God of Things as They Are. In the novel the writer's thought is tethered to probability, but in romance it ranges at will over the entire region of the imagination ... ~ Ambrose Bierce

My medium is prose, not the novel. ~ David Shields

The excitement of theatre is palpable but the frustrations, and the complete absence of a definitive evening - the play as text means practically nothing in a way - , there's no particular performance that is definitive in the way a novel is a solid object you hold in your hands and here it is. You can't say that about a play. If the novel gives us a sense of throbbing consciousness, theater is pure soul, beautiful and elusive. ~ Don DeLillo

Instead of making myself write the book I ought to write, the novel that was expected of me, I conjured up the book I myself would have liked to read, the sort by an unknown writer, from another age and another country, discovered in an attic. ITALO CALVINO ~ Salman Rushdie

It's very bad to write a novel by act of will. I can do a book of nonfiction work that way - just sign the contract and do the book because, provided the topic has some meaning for me, I know I can do it. But a novel is different. A novel is more like falling in love. You don't say, 'I'm going to fall in love next Tuesday, I'm going to begin my novel.' The novel has to come to you. It has to feel just like love. ~ Norman Mailer

When I'm trying a new form- trying to do something I'm not used to doing, which was true of the novel. ~ Lydia Davis

For me, with any character, there are different ways that you approach understanding him, and in this film in particular, because I had the novel to refer to. It's always really helpful to have all of that information and all of those hundreds more words which give you an idea into the background and your character and all. ~ Asa Butterfield

The only thing which can tell us about the novel is the novel. ~ Edwin Muir

The novel begins in a railway station, a locomotive huffs, steam from a piston covers the opening of the chapter, a cloud of smoke hides part of the first paragraph. ~ Italo Calvino

As to the strangest claim in the novel: that only 10 percent of the cells in our body are human (and the rest are bacteria and parasites). This is true! There is a wonderful book exploring this topic that is as horrific as it is humorous, Human Wildlife by Dr. Robert Buckman. ~ James Rollins

A new opinion counts as true just in proportion as it gratifies the individual's desire to assimilate the novel in his experience to his beliefs in stock ~ William James

A subplot is a distinguishing characteristic of the novel; the short story, for example, does not need subplots. ~ Darin Strauss

She is a bold and passionate woman, fighting to earn respect as a farm owner and over the course of the novel she has to endure much suffering, which enhances her better qualities while diminishing some elements of her less admirable traits. ~ Thomas Hardy

I have always been considered a bit of an outsider, and a general failure at everything I put my hand towards. In fact, you might even go so far as to say that I'm a lesser being of great insignificance! I state this because, when writing a story, you should always start the first line off with at least one basic truth.
-First lines from the novel Sukiyaki ~ Andrew James Pritchard

I always try to create conflict and drama in my books; it's the engine of the novel. ~ Monica Ali

Randy stared into the glass he held in his hand, gazing into its cobra eyes. A double shot of thirty-year-old single malt whisky. You can't be an alcoholic when you only drink top shelf. Right? ~ Ted Magnuson

The problem lies not with the characters within the novel, but with the reader itself. ~ Vladimir Nabokov

Between history and the novel stands biography, their unwanted offspring, which has brought a great embarrassment to them both. ~ Michael Holroyd

Moreover, what is true for the history of antisemitism, that it fell into the hands of non-Jewish crackpots and Jewish apologetics, and was carefully avoided by reputable historians, is true, mutatis mutandis, for nearly all elements that later crystallized in the novel totalitarian phenomenon; they had hardly been noticed by either learned or public opinion because they belonged to a subterranean stream of European history where, hidden from the light of the public and the attention of enlightened men, they had been able to gather an entirely unexpected virulence. ~ Hannah Arendt

From the freedom to explore comes the joy of learning. From knowledge acquired by personal initiative arises the desire for more knowledge. And from mastery of the novel and beautiful world awaiting every child comes self-confidence. ~ E. O. Wilson

I'm one of those writers who started off writing novels and came to writing short stories later, partly because I didn't have the right ideas, partly because I think that short stories are more difficult. I think learning to write short stories also made me attracted toward a paring down of the novel form. ~ Julian Barnes

At every moment I convinced myself that I was gathering material for the novel of my life - all experienced from the philosophical distance of the author. Even these humiliating occasions when I was robbed could be used as material. Life was a field trip. ~ Edmund White

Then, although it was still the end of the story, I put it at the beginning of the novel, as if I needed to tell the end first in order to go on and tell the rest. It would have been simpler to begin at the beginning, but the beginning didn't mean much without what came after, and what came after didn't mean much without the end. ~ Lydia Davis

A mystery man has just died in the novel. I've had these same thoughts when I see some of the homeless.

"Then there is rest around the lonely figure, now laid in its last earthly habitation; and it is watched by the gaunt eyes in the shutters through some quiet hours of night. If this forlorn man could have been prophetically seen lying here by the mother at whose breast he nestled, a little child, with eyes upraised to her loving face, and soft hand scarcely knowing how to close upon the neck to which it crept, what an impossibility the vision would have seemed! Oh, if in brighter days the now-extinguished fire within him ever burned for one woman who held him in her heart, where is she, while these ashes are above the ground! ~ Charles Dickens

I turned to the novel, an artistic form which had in former days been neglected and had thus acquired a bad reputation, but which during the nineteenth century had developed and elevated itself to the ranks occupied by drama and the ancient epic. ~ Henrik Pontoppidan

I wouldn't have thought that the techniques of story-telling, which is what the novel is after all, can vary much because there are two things involved.There's a story and there's a listener, whose attention you have to keep. Now the only way in which you can keep a reader's attention to a story is in his wanting to know what is going to happen next. This puts a fairly close restriction on the method you must use. ~ William Golding

I don't think Ireland has ever had a genius for the novel. Of course, there were plenty of Irish novels, but I don't think that was ever the natural means of expression for the Irish. ~ Lady Gregory

The cases described in this section (The Fear of Being) may seem extreme, but I have become convinced that they are not as uncommon as one would think. Beneath the seemingly rational exterior of our lives is a fear of insanity. We dare not question the values by which we live or rebel against the roles we play for fear of putting our sanity into doubt. We are like the inmates of a mental institution who must accept its inhumanity and insensitivity as caring and knowledgeableness if they hope to be regarded as sane enough to leave. The question who is sane and who is crazy was the theme of the novel One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest. The question, what is sanity? was clearly asked in the play Equus.
The idea that much of what we do is insane and that if we want to be sane, we must let ourselves go crazy has been strongly advanced by R.D. Laing. In the preface to the Pelican edition of his book The Divided Self, Laing writes: "In the context of our present pervasive madness that we call normality, sanity, freedom, all of our frames of reference are ambiguous and equivocal." And in the same preface: "Thus I would wish to emphasize that our 'normal' 'adjusted' state is too often the abdication of ecstasy, the betrayal of our true potentialities; that many of us are only too successful in acquiring a false self to adapt to false realities."
Wilhelm Reich had a somewhat similar view of present-day human behavior. Thus Reich says, "Homo normalis blocks off entirely the perce ~ Alexander Lowen

A man who is not born with the novel-writing gift has a troublesome time of it when he tries to build a novel. I know this from experience. He has no clear idea of his story; in fact he has no story. He merely has some people in his mind, and an incident or two, also a locality, and he trusts he can plunge those people into those incidents with interesting results. So he goes to work. To write a novel? No
that is a thought which comes later; in the beginning he is only proposing to tell a little tale, a very little tale, a six-page tale. But as it is a tale which he is not acquainted with, and can only find out what it is by listening as it goes along telling itself, it is more than apt to go on and on and on till it spreads itself into a book. I know about this, because it has happened to me so many times. ~ Mark Twain

The novel cannot submit to authority. ~ Julian Gough

I have often heard that the novel is dead. But I see novels produced, I don't know how many a week, in France. I have the impression it's carrying along quite well. ~ Nathalie Sarraute

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

In The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Tereza lives with Tomas, but her love requires mobilization of all her strength, and suddenly she can't go on, she longs to retreat down below, to where she came from. And I ask myself: What is happening with her? And this is the answer I find: She is overcome by vertigo. But what is vertigo? I look for a definition and I say: "A heady, insuperable longing to fall." But immediately I correct myself, I sharpen the definition: Vertigo is "the intoxication of the weak. Aware of his weakness, a man decides to give in rather than stand up to it. He is drunk with weakness, wishes to grow even weaker, wishes to fall down in the middle of the main square in front of everybody, wishes to be down, lower than down. Vertigo is one of the keys to understanding Tereza ~ Milan Kundera

The comic book is not the book. the graphic novel is not the novel. The same, of course, is true of films and television. When we move a story from one medium to another, no matter how faithful we attempt to be, some changes are inevitable. Each medium has its own demands, own restrictions, its own way of telling a story. ~ George R R Martin

Case in point: Byrdie, the son growing effortlessly into lifelong boyhood. Still a schoolboy, soon to be an old boy, blithely accepting accidents as privileges - for instance, his natural immunity to HIV. (Byrdie liked studious, upper-class females. They were not exactly high risk.) Byrdie was the phoenix edition of Lee, adapted to the novel environment, and Lee was a useless relic. He had positioned himself all his life as a rebel against a hegemonic order no one was interested in questioning anymore. It had lost its power to crush and all its clumsy weapons that inspired active fear. Its dominance was equal, but separate. ~ Nell Zink

If you try to nail anything down, in the novel, either it kills the novel, or the novel gets up and walks away with the nail. ~ D.H. Lawrence

Creating the characters is the most creative part of the novel except for the language itself. There I am, sitting in front of my computer in right-brain mode, typing the things that come to mind - which become the seeds of plot. It's scary, though, because I always wonder: Is it going to be there this time? ~ Elizabeth George

The natural, proper, fitting shape of the novel might be that of a sack, a bag. A book holds words. Words hold things. They bear meanings. A novel is a medicine bundle, holding things in a particular, powerful relation to one another and to us. ~ Ursula K. Le Guin

The North Korean state was born at about the same time that Nineteen Eighty-Four was published, and one could almost believe that the holy father of the state, Kim Il Sung, was given a copy of the novel and asked if he could make it work in practice. Yet even Orwell did not dare to have it said that "Big Brother's" birth was attended by miraculous signs and portents - such as birds hailing the glorious event by singing in human words. ~ Christopher Hitchens

The novel is inherently a political instrument, regardless of its subject. It invites you - more than invites you, induces you - to live inside another person's skin. It creates empathy. And that's the antidote to bigotry. The novel doesn't just tell you about another life, which is what a newspaper would do. It makes you live another life, inhabit another perspective. And that's very important. ~ Barbara Kingsolver

To be born again," sang Gibreel Farishta tumbling from the heavens, "first you have to die. ~ Salman Rushdie

In the Novel

He described her mouth as full of ashes.
So when he kissed her finally
he was thinking about ashes

and the blacker rim just below
the edge of the ashtray,
and the faint dark rim that outlined her lips,

and the lips themselves, at the limit
of another darkness, farther
and far more interior.

Then the way the red,
paling, just outside those lines
caught fire and the pages caught

soon after that. Slowly at first,
but then all at once
at the scalloped brown corners of each;

like the ruff of an offended and darkening bird,
extended, then folded
in on itself; multiple,

stiffening, gone. ~ Susan Stewart

I enjoy research; in fact research is so engaging that it would be easy to go on for years, and never write the novel at all. ~ Helen Dunmore

The ugly fact is books are made out of books, the novel depends for its life on the novels that have been written. ~ Cormac McCarthy

It is my job to create universes, as the basis of one novel after another. And I have to build them in such a way that they do not fall apart two days later.
Or at least that's what my editors hope.
However, I will reveal a secret to you:
I like to build universes which do fall apart. I like to see them unglued, and I like to see how how the characters in the novel cope with this problem.
I have a scret love of chaos. There should be more of it. ~ Philip K. Dick

Stories are my art and my solace. They could also be my weapons. Stories give more than facts. Stories touch the conscience and stimulate action. That is my motive and my goal, to put research and study and feeling into that cauldron called the novel. ~ Sonia Levitin

My mother had brought me here when I was fifteen, on a Sunday after I'd read Look Homeward, Angel for the first time. She'd loved the novel, memorizing whole paragraphs, and, of course, naming me after the book's main character. It is a novel you have to read as a young person or you don't get it. ~ Ron Rash

The novel is not the author's confession; it is an investigation of human life in the trap the world has become ~ Milan Kundera

The novel, in its best form, I regard as one of the most powerful engines of civilization ever invented. ~ John Herschel

In general, when a novel manipulates its material to conform to the pieties of the day, or alternatively to attack those pieties for no other reason than the visibility such an attack will generate, when its literary tropes are all too familiar, its clever prose reminiscent of other clever prose, then the compass needle is slipping away from true north ... When, on the other hand, the author renounces some easy twist, some expected payoff, to take us into territory we didn't expect but that nevertheless fits with the drift of the story, then the novel gains force and conviction. And when he or she does it again, telling quite a different story that is nevertheless driven by the same urgent tensions, then we are likely moving into the zone of authenticity. ~ Tim Parks

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

I settled in with The Uninvited Guests thinking I knew what kind of Edwardian pleasures were in store: the fraught dinner party in an endangered, rambling house, the feuding family, the rich suitor, the disruptive visitors. The novel has all of those delightful things, but it also defied every one of my expectations. I saw none of it coming. I read it in one breathless sitting, and finished wanting to give it to everyone I know. ~ Maile Meloy

I think the path to becoming a writer has become more through the novel. It's easier to get a novel published than a book of stories, obviously, especially through big publishers. ~ Jess Walter