What is a novel if not a conviction of our fellow-men’s existence strong enough to take upon itself a form of imagined life clearer than reality and whose accumulated verisimilitude of selected episodes puts to shame the pride of documentary history?
—Joseph Conrad (1857–1924) Polish-born British Novelist
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 good ended happily, and the bad unhappily. That is what Fiction means.
—Oscar Wilde (1854–1900) Irish Poet, Playwright
Romances I never read like those I have seen.
—Lord Byron (George Gordon Byron) (1788–1824) English Romantic Poet
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
Undermining experience, embellishing experience, rearranging and enlarging experience into a species of mythology.
—Philip Roth (1933–2018) American Novelist, Short-story Writer
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
There is no longer any such thing as fiction or nonfiction; there’s only narrative.
—E. L. Doctorow (b.1931) American Writer, Editor, Academic
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
Our interest’s on the dangerous edge of things. The honest thief, the tender murderer, the superstitious atheist.
—Robert Browning (1812–89) English Poet
The really great novel tends to be the exact negative of its author’s life.
—Andre Maurois (1885–1967) French Novelist, Biographer
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
Man is a poetical animal and delights in fiction.
—William Hazlitt (1778–1830) English Essayist
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
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
It’s with bad sentiments that one makes good novels.
—Aldous Huxley (1894–1963) English Humanist, Pacifist, Essayist, Short Story Writer, Satirist
The most influential books and the truest in their influence, are works of fiction.—They repeat, rearrange, and clarify the lessons of life, disengage us from ourselves, constrain us to the acquaintance of others, and show us the web of experience, but with a single change.—That monstrous, consuming ego of ours struck out.
—Robert Louis Stevenson (1850–94) Scottish Novelist
But I hate things all fiction… there should always be some foundation of fact for the most airy fabric—and pure invention is but the talent of a liar.
—Lord Byron (George Gordon Byron) (1788–1824) English Romantic Poet
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
The time-honored bread-sauce of the happy ending.
—Henry James (1843–1916) American-born British Novelist, 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
Novels as dull as dishwater, with the grease of random sentiments floating on top.
—Italo Calvino (1923–85) Italian Novelist, Essayist, Journalist
We live in a world ruled by fictions of every kind—mass merchandising, advertising, politics conducted as a branch of advertising, the instant translation of science and technology into popular imagery, the increasing blurring and intermingling of identities within the realm of consumer goods, the preempting of any free or original imaginative response to experience by the television screen. We live inside an enormous novel. For the writer in particular it is less and less necessary for him to invent the fictional content of his novel. The fiction is already there. The writer’s task is to invent the reality.
—J. G. Ballard (1930–2009) English Novelist, Short Story Writer
All great novels, all true novels, are bisexual.
—Milan Kundera (b.1929) Czech 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
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
Novelists do not write as birds sing, by the push of nature. It is part of the job that there should be much routine and some daily stuff on the level of carpentry.
—William Golding (1911–93) English Novelist
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
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
By its very nature, the novel indicates that we are becoming. There is no final solution. There is no last word.
—Carlos Fuentes (1928–2012) Mexican Novelist, Diplomat