• It's with bad sentiments that one makes good novels.

  

  Aldous Huxley

  AuthorBritish1894 · 19th century

  3.5 · 20 votes · 81 reads

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• 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 b

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  Anthony Burgess

  AuthorEnglish1917 · 20th century

  4.9 · 45 votes · 59 reads

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• Novels so often provide an anodyne and not an antidote, glide one into torpid slumbers instead of rousing one with a burning brand.

  

  Vincent van Gogh

  PainterDutch1853 · 19th century

  3.4 · 49 votes · 185 reads

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• One should not be too severe on English novels; they are the only relaxation of the intellectually unemployed.

  

  Oscar Wilde

  PoetIrish1854 · 19th century

  3.7 · 6 votes · 146 reads

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• Our interest's on the dangerous edge of things. The honest thief, the tender murderer, the superstitious atheist.

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  Robert Bresson

  Film directorFrench1901 · 20th century

  3.9 · 27 votes · 41 reads

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• Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot.

  

  Mark Twain

  WriterAmerican1835 · 19th century

  3.1 · 9 votes · 13 reads

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• Romances I never read like those I have seen.

  

  Lord Byron

  PoetBritish1788 · 18th century

  5.0 · 11 votes · 170 reads

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• Science fiction writers foresee the inevitable, and although problems and catastrophes may be inevitable, solutions are not.

  

  Isaac Asimov

  ScientistAmerican1920 · 20th century

  5.0 · 51 votes · 41 reads

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• The acceptance that all that is solid has melted into the air, that reality and morality are not givens but imperfect human constructs, is the point from which fiction begins.

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  Saint Thomas Aquinas

  TheologianRoman1224 · 13th century

  4.2 · 49 votes · 176 reads

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• The good ended happily, and the bad unhappily. That is what Fiction means.

  

  Oscar Wilde

  PoetIrish1854 · 19th century

  4.1 · 27 votes · 156 reads

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• 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.

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  Saint Thomas Aquinas

  TheologianRoman1224 · 13th century

  3.4 · 9 votes · 178 reads

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• The only reason for the existence of a novel is that it does attempt to represent life.

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  Henry James

  AuthorAmerican-British1843 · 19th century

  3.5 · 38 votes · 113 reads

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• 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.

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  Anonymous

  3.5 · 55 votes · 139 reads

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• The really great novel tends to be the exact negative of its author's life.

  

  André Maurois

  WriterFrench1885 · 19th century

  3.9 · 44 votes · 120 reads

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• The time-honored bread-sauce of the happy ending.

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  Henry James

  AuthorAmerican-British1843 · 19th century

  4.7 · 56 votes · 33 reads

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• 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

  NovelistBritish1857 · 19th century

  4.8 · 38 votes · 114 reads

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• When I heard the word ''stream'' uttered with such a revolting primness, what I think of is urine and not the contemporary novel. And besides, it isn't new, it is far from the dernier cri. Shakespeare used it continually, much too much in my opinion, and

  

  James Joyce

  AuthorIrish1882 · 19th century

  4.2 · 26 votes · 140 reads

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• When writing a novel a Writershould create living people; people not characters. A character is a caricature.

  

  Ernest Hemingway

  WriterAmerican1899 · 19th century

  4.5 · 44 votes · 153 reads

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• 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.

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  Katherine Mansfield

  WriterEnglish1888 · 19th century

  3.0 · 18 votes · 35 reads

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• Writing a novel is not merely going on a shopping expedition across the border to an unreal land: it is hours and years spent in the factories, the streets, the cathedrals of the imagination.

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  Janet Frame

  WriterNew Zealand1924 · 20th century

  3.3 · 45 votes · 183 reads

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