A novel that does not uncover a hitherto unknown segment of existence is immoral. Knowledge is the novel’s only morality.
—Milan Kundera (b.1929) Czech Novelist
Democritus plucked his eye out because he could not look at a woman without thinking of her as a woman. If he had read a few of our novels, he would have torn himself to pieces.
—Wallace Stevens (1879–1955) American Poet
Fiction is not imagination. It is what anticipates imagination by giving it the form of reality. This is quite opposite to our own natural tendency which is to anticipate reality by imagining it, or to flee from it by idealizing it. That is why we shall never inhabit true fiction; we are condemned to the imaginary and nostalgia for the future.
—Jean Baudrillard (1929–2007) French Sociologist, Philosopher
Many works of fiction may be read with safety; some even with profit; but the constant familiarity, even with such as are not exceptionable in themselves, relaxes the mind, which needs hardening; dissolves the heart, which wants fortifying; stirs the imagination, which wants quieting; irritates the passions, which want calming; and, above all, disinclines and disqualifies for active virtues and for spiritual exercises. The habitual indulgence in such reading, is a silent mining mischief. Though there is no act, and no moment, in which any open assault on the mind is made, yet the constant habit performs the work of a mental atrophy—it produces all the symptoms of decay; and the danger is not less for being more gradual, and therefore less suspected.
—Hannah More
The traditional novel form continues to enlarge our experience in those very areas where the wide-angle lens and the Cinema screen tend to narrow it.
—Daniel J. Boorstin (1914–2004) American Historian, Academic, Attorney, Writer
A novelist is, like all mortals, more fully at home on the surface of the present than in the ooze of the past.
—Vladimir Nabokov (1899–1977) Russian-born American Novelist
Man is a poetical animal and delights in fiction.
—William Hazlitt (1778–1830) English Essayist
Fiction is no longer a mere amusement; but transcendent genius, accommodating itself to the character of the age, has seized upon this province of literature, and turned fiction from a toy into a mighty engine.
—William Ellery Channing (1780–1842) American Unitarian Theologian, Poet
The really great novel tends to be the exact negative of its author’s life.
—Andre Maurois (1885–1967) French Novelist, Biographer
Writing fiction has become a priestly business in countries that have lost their faith.
—Gore Vidal (1925–48) American Novelist, Essayist, Journalist, Playwright
Would you not like to try all sorts of lives—one is so very small—but that is the satisfaction of writing—one can impersonate so many people.
—Katherine Mansfield (1888–1923) New Zealand-born British Author
Writing a novel is actually searching for victims. As I write I keep looking for casualties. The stories uncover the casualties.
—John Irving (b.1942) American Novelist, Short-story Writer
The purpose of a work of fiction is to appeal to the lingering after-effects in the reader’s mind as differing from, say, the purpose of oratory or philosophy which respectively leave people in a fighting or thoughtful mood.
—Unknown
There is no longer any such thing as fiction or nonfiction; there’s only narrative.
—E. L. Doctorow (b.1931) American Writer, Editor, Academic
Fiction is not falsehood, as some seem to think;—It is rather the fanciful and dramatic grouping of real traits around imaginary scenes or characters.—It may give false views of men or things, or it may, in the hands of a master, more truthfully portray life than sober history itself.
—Tryon Edwards (1809–94) American Theologian, Author
The only reason for the existence of a novel is that it does attempt to represent life.
—Henry James (1843–1916) American-born British Novelist, Writer
One should not be too severe on English novels; they are the only relaxation of the intellectually unemployed.
—Oscar Wilde (1854–1900) Irish Poet, Playwright
You know that fiction, prose rather, is possibly the roughest trade of all in writing. You do not have the reference, the old important reference. You have the sheet of blank paper, the pencil, and the obligation to invent truer than things can be true. You have to take what is not palpable and make it completely palpable and also have it seem normal and so that it can become a part of experience of the person who reads it.
—Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961) American Author, Journalist, Short Story Writer
When the characters are really alive before their author, the latter does nothing but follow them in their action, in their words, in the situations which they suggest to him.
—Luigi Pirandello (1867–1936) Italian Dramatist, Novelist, Short Story Writer, Author
Romances I never read like those I have seen.
—Lord Byron (George Gordon Byron) (1788–1824) English Romantic Poet
Educating a son I should allow him no fairy tales and only a very few novels. This is to prevent him from having 1. the sense of romantic solitude (if he is worth anything he will develop a proper and useful solitude) which identification with the hero gives. 2. cant ideas of right and wrong, absurd systems of honor and morality which never will he be able completely to get rid of, 3. the attainment of “ideals,” of a priori desires, of a priori emotions. He should amuse himself with fact only: he will then not learn that if the weak younger son do or do not the magical honorable thing he will win the princess with hair like flax.
—Lionel Trilling (1905–75) American Literary Critic
All great novels, all true novels, are bisexual.
—Milan Kundera (b.1929) Czech Novelist
There is something else which has the power to awaken us to the truth. It is the works of writers of genius. They give us, in the guise of fiction, something equivalent to the actual density of the real, that density which life offers us every day but which we are unable to grasp because we are amusing ourselves with lies.
—Simone Weil (1909–1943) French Philosopher, Political Activist
It’s with bad sentiments that one makes good novels.
—Aldous Huxley (1894–1963) English Humanist, Pacifist, Essayist, Short Story Writer, Satirist
By measuring individual human worth, the novelist reveals the full enormity of the State’s crime when it sets out to crush that individuality.
—Ian McEwan British Novelist, Short-Story Writer
The novel does not seek to establish a privileged language but it insists upon the freedom to portray and analyze the struggle between the different contestants for such privileges.
—Salman Rushdie (b.1947) Indian-born British Novelist
Novels so often provide an anodyne and not an antidote, glide one into torpid slumbers instead of rousing one with a burning brand.
—Virginia Woolf (1882–1941) English Novelist
When writing a novel a writer should create living people; people not characters. A character is a caricature.
—Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961) American Author, Journalist, Short Story Writer
I find in most novels no imagination at all. They seem to think the highest form of the novel is to write about marriage, because that’s the most important thing there is for middle-class people.
—Gore Vidal (1925–48) American Novelist, Essayist, Journalist, Playwright
Novelists are perhaps the last people in the world to be entrusted with opinions. The nature of a novel is that it has no opinions, only the dialectic of contrary views, some of which, all of which, may be untenable and even silly. A novelist should not be too intelligent either, although he may be permitted to be an intellectual.
—Anthony Burgess (1917–93) English Novelist, Critic, Composer
Leave a Reply