(152 quotes found)
“Conversation should be pleasant without scurrility, witty without affectation, free without indecency, learned without conceitedness, novel without falsehood”
William Shakespeare
“Love is more pleasant than marriage for the same reason that novels are more amusing than history”
Chamfort
“San Francisco itself is art, above all literary art. Every block is a short story, every hill a novel. Every home a poem, every dweller within immortal. That is the whole truth.”
William Saroyan
“One should be able to return to the first sentence of a novel and find the resonances of the entire work.”
Gloria Naylor
“All great novels, all true novels, are bisexual.”
Milan Kundera
“I wrote some three hundred pages, threw most of them out, and started over. The novel seemed to require a maturity and breadth of vision I didn't yet have. What I discovered was that this maturity and vision accrues gradually over the course of many days, months, years of struggling to be a better writer.”
John Dalton
“By its very nature, the novel indicates that we are becoming. There is no final solution. There is no last word.”
Carlos Fuentes
“I review novels to make money, because it is easier for a sluggard to write an article a fortnight than a book a year, because the writer is soothed by the opiate of action, the crank by posing as a good journalist, and having an air hole. I dislike”
Cyril Connolly
“A novel is balanced between a few true impressions and the multitude of false ones that make up most of what we call life.”
Saul Bellow
“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
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