Quote: 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. Author: J. G. Ballard 1930-, British Author
Quote: Novels are longer than life. Author: Natalie Clifford Barney 1876-1972, American-born French Author
Quote: 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. Author: Jean Baudrillard French Postmodern Philosopher, Writer
Quote: 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. Author: Daniel J. Boorstin 1914-, American Historian
Quote: Writing novels preserves you in a state of innocence -- a lot passes you by -- simply because your attention is otherwise diverted. Author: Anita Brookner 1938-, British Novelist, Art Historian
Quote: Our interest's on the dangerous edge of things. The honest thief, the tender murderer, the superstitious atheist. Author: Robert Browning 1812-1889, British Poet
Quote: If you write fiction you are, in a sense, corrupted. There's a tremendous corruptibility for the fiction writer because you're dealing mainly with sex and violence. These remain the basic themes, they're the basic themes of Shakespeare whether you like it or not. Author: Anthony Burgess 1917-1993, British Writer, Critic
Quote: 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. Author: Anthony Burgess 1917-1993, British Writer, Critic
Quote: 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. Author: Lord Byron 1788-1824, British Poet
Quote: Romances I never read like those I have seen. Author: Lord Byron 1788-1824, British Poet
Quote: Novels as dull as dishwater, with the grease of random sentiments floating on top. Author: Italo Calvino 1923-1985, Cuban Writer, Essayist, Journalist
Quote: 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? Author: Joseph Conrad 1857-1924, Polish-born British Novelist
Quote: The narrative impulse is always with us; we couldn't imagine ourselves through a day without it. Author: Robert Coover
Quote: If I were a writer, how I would enjoy being told the novel is dead. How liberating to work in the margins, outside a central perception. You are the ghoul of literature. Lovely. Author: Don Delillo 1926-, American Author
Quote: There is no longer any such thing as fiction or nonfiction; there's only narrative. Author: E. L. Doctorow 1931-, American Novelist
Quote: I at least have so much to do in unraveling certain human lots, and seeing how they were woven and interwoven, that all the light I can command must be concentrated on this particular web, and not dispersed over that tempting range of relevancies called the universe. Author: George Eliot 1819-1880, British Novelist
Quote: The final test for a novel will be our affection for it, as it is the test of our friends, and of anything else which we cannot define. Author: Edward M. Forster 1879-1970, British Novelist, Essayist
Quote: 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. Author: Janet Frame 1924-, New Zealand Novelist, Poet
Quote: By its very nature, the novel indicates that we are becoming. There is no final solution. There is no last word. Author: Carlos Fuentes 1928-, Mexican Novelist, Short-Story Writer
Quote: 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. Author: William Golding 1911-1993, British Author
Quote: When writing a novel a writer should create living people; people not characters. A character is a caricature. Author: Ernest Hemingway 1898-1961, American Writer
Quote: 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. Author: Ernest Hemingway 1898-1961, American Writer
Quote: All that non-fiction can do is answer questions. It's fiction's business to ask them. Author: Richard Hughes
Quote: It's with bad sentiments that one makes good novels. Author: Aldous Huxley 1894-1963, British Author
Quote: Writing a novel is actually searching for victims. As I write I keep looking for casualties. The stories uncover the casualties. Author: John Irving 1942-, American Author
Quote: The only reason for the existence of a novel is that it does attempt to represent life. Author: Henry James 1843-1916, American Author
Quote: The time-honored bread-sauce of the happy ending. Author: Henry James 1843-1916, American Author
Quote: 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 there's Tristam Shandy, not to mention the Agamemnon. Author: James Joyce 1882-1941, Irish Author
Quote: Fiction is the truth inside the lie. Author: Stephen King 1947-, American Horror Writer, Actor
Quote: A novel that does not uncover a hitherto unknown segment of existence is immoral. Knowledge is the novel's only morality. Author: Milan Kundera 1929-, Czech Author, Critic
Quote: All great novels, all true novels, are bisexual. Author: Milan Kundera 1929-, Czech Author, Critic
Quote: No matter how ephemeral it is, a novel is something, while despair is nothing. Author: Mario Vargas Llosa 1936-, Latin American Author
Quote: 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. Author: Katherine Mansfield 1888-1923, New Zealand-born British Author
Quote: For if the proper study of mankind is man, it is evidently more sensible to occupy yourself with the coherent, substantial and significant creatures of fiction than with the irrational and shadowy figures of real life. Author: W. Somerset Maugham 1874-1965, British Novelist, Playwright
Quote: The really great novel tends to be the exact negative of its author's life. Author: Andre Maurois 1885-1967, French Writer
Quote: By measuring individual human worth, the novelist reveals the full enormity of the State's crime when it sets out to crush that individuality. Author: Ian Mcewan 1948-, British Author
Quote: A novelist is, like all mortals, more fully at home on the surface of the present than in the ooze of the past. Author: Vladimir Nabokov 1899-1977, Russian-born American Novelist, Poet
Quote: For a Jewish Puritan of the middle class, the novel is serious, the novel is work, the novel is conscientious application -- why, the novel is practically the retail business all over again. Author: Howard Nemerov 1920-1991, American Poet
Quote: Jesus of Nazareth could have chosen simply to express Himself in moral precepts; but like a great poet He chose the form of the parable, wonderful short stories that entertained and clothed the moral precept in an eternal form. It is not sufficient to catch man's mind, you must also catch the imaginative faculties of his mind. Author: Dudley Nichols American Actor
Quote: It seems that the fiction writer has a revolting attachment to the poor, for even when he writes about the rich, he is more concerned with what they lack than with what they have. Author: Flannery O'Connor 1925-1964, American Author
Quote: The first sentence of every novel should be: ''Trust me, this will take time but there is order here, very faint, very human.'' Meander if you want to get to town. Author: Michael Ondaatje
Quote: 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. Author: Luigi Pirandello 1867-1936, Italian Author, Playwright
Quote: Undermining experience, embellishing experience, rearranging and enlarging experience into a species of mythology. Author: Philip Roth 1933-, American Novelist
Quote: 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. Author: Salman Rushdie 1948-, Indian-born British Author
Quote: 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. Author: Salman Rushdie 1948-, Indian-born British Author
Quote: 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. Author: Wallace Stevens 1879-1955, American Poet
Quote: 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. Author: Lionel Trilling 1905-1975, American Critic
Quote: 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. Author: Mark Twain 1835-1910, American Humorist, Writer
Quote: 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. Author: Source Unknown
Quote: 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. Author: Gore Vidal 1925-, American Novelist, Critic
Quote: Writing fiction has become a priestly business in countries that have lost their faith. Author: Gore Vidal 1925-, American Novelist, Critic
Quote: 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. Author: Simone Weil 1910-1943, French Philosopher, Mystic
Quote: One should not be too severe on English novels; they are the only relaxation of the intellectually unemployed. Author: Oscar Wilde 1856-1900, British Author, Wit
Quote: The good ended happily, and the bad unhappily. That is what Fiction means. Author: Oscar Wilde 1856-1900, British Author, Wit
Quote: Fiction is like a spider's web, attached ever so lightly perhaps, but still attached to life at all four corners. Often the attachment is scarcely perceptible. Author: Virginia Woolf 1882-1941, British Novelist, Essayist
Quote: Novels so often provide an anodyne and not an antidote, glide one into torpid slumbers instead of rousing one with a burning brand. Author: Virginia Woolf 1882-1941, British Novelist, Essayist