Novel

Diana felt she was beginning to understand why, in all those novels she read, the headiest loves were the loves that couldn't be.

— Novel

Life is painful and disappointing. It is useless, therefore, to write new realistic novels. We generally know where we stand in relation to reality and don’t care to know any more.”

— Novel

Writing a novel is actually searching for victims. As I write I keep looking for casualties. The stories uncover the casualties.

— Novel

The novel is the one bright book of life. Books are not life. They are only tremulations on the ether. But the novel as a tremulation can make the whole man alive tremble.

— Novel

Life must not be a novel that is given to us, but one that is made by us.

— Novel

The novel belongs to the category of natural poetry - the allegory to that of the artificial.

— Novel

Sir, ’said Stephen,‘ I read novels with the utmost pertinacity. I look upon them--I look upon good novels--as a very valuable part of literature, conveying more exact and finely-distinguished knowledge of the human heart and mind than almost any other, with greater breadth and depth and fewer constraints.”

— Novel

[on an unnamed book] This is not a novel to be tossed aside lightly. It should be thrown with great force.

— Novel

No one says a novel has to be one thing. It can be anything it wants to be, a vaudeville show, the six o’clock news, the mumblings of wild men saddled by demons.

— Novel

Every novel is like this, desperation, a frustrated attempt to save something of the past. Except that it still has not been established whether it is the novel that prevents man from forgetting himself or the impossibility of forgetfulness that makes him write novels.

— Novel

The main question to a novel is -- did it amuse? Were you surprised at dinner coming so soon? Did you mistake eleven for ten? Were you too late to dress? And did you sit up beyond the usual hour? If a novel produces these effects, it is good; if it does not -- story, language, love, scandal itself cannot save it. It is only meant to please; and it must do that or it does nothing.

— Novel

Someone ought to write a novel about me, ”said Lebedeva loftily.“ I shouldn’t care if they lied to make it more interesting, as long as they were good lies, full of kisses and daring escapes and the occasional act of barbarism. I can’t abide a poor liar.

— Novel

In every first novel the hero is the author as Christ or Faust

— Novel

What are American dry-goods? asked the duchess, raising her large hands in wonder and accentuating the verb. American novels, answered Lord Henry.

— Novel

...in a volume of dozen lines of Milton, Proper and Prior, with a paper from the Spectator and a chapter from the Sterne are eulogized by a thousand pens-there seems almost a general wish of decrying the capacity and undervaluing the labour of the novelist, and slighting the performance which have only genius, wit and taste to recommend them.

— Novel

I am no novel reader – I seldom look into novels - Do not imagine that I often read novels - It is only very well for a novel.

— Novel

And what are you reading miss...? It is only a novel... or, 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.

— Novel

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

— Novel

A short story is a love affair, a novel is a marriage. A short story is a photograph; a novel is a film.”

— Novel

...A novel is a daily labor over a period of years. A novel is a job…But a story can be a mad, lovely visitor, with whom you spend a rather exciting weekend.

— Novel

Punning on the typographical and literary meaning of the word “character” and exploiting the resemblance of the “word” with “world”, Moore has identified the purpose of transpositions like this which continue throughout the novel: I was inspired by the idea of anagram, which is the rearrangement of characters to make new worlds.

— Novel

I believed the novel to be a messy expression of that mysterious banality ‘the creative process’- not unlike life, I suppose.

— Novel