The battles may last for a long time, perhaps even years. There are powerful forces on both sides, and the war is important to both armies. It's not a battle of good against evil. It's a war between f...
Faction is that hybrid of documented fact and novelistic elaboration.
There are three secrets to writing a novel. Unfortunately nobody knows what they are.
The only thing which can tell us about the novel is the novel.
Early on, for better or worse, I chose whose child I wanted to be: the child of the novel. Almost everything else was subjugated to this ruling passion, reading stories. As a consequence, I can barely...
Cecy, I do think it is unfair. People in novels are fainting all the time, and I never can, no matter how badly I need to.
In this place called Hell novels are written by people who don't read books.
Every novel is an attempt to capture time, to weave something solid out of air. The author knows it is an impossible task - that is why he keeps on trying.
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.
We read novels because we want to see the world through other experiences, other beings, other eyes, other cultures.
Now the son whose father's existance in this world is historical and speculative even before the son has entered it in a bad way. All his life he carries before him the idol of a perfection to which h...
He shivered. His coat was thin, and it was obvious he would not get his kiss, which he found puzzling. The manly heroes of the penny dreadfuls and shilling novels never had these problems getting kiss...
I like shape very much. A novel has to have shape, and life doesn't have any.
And she did what nobody thought of doing... she consulted Anne.
If you read the novel in more than two weeks, you don't read the novel really
The novels we read allow us to encounter possible persons, versions of ourselves hat we would never see, never permit ourselves to see, never permit ourselves to become, in places we can never go and...
Of course, reading novels was just another form of escape. As soon as he closed their pages he had to come back to the real world. But at some point Tengo noticed that returning to reality from the wo...
It has been well said that an author who expects results from a first novel is in a position similar to that of a man who drops a rose petal down the Grand Canyon of Arizona and listens for the echo.
What does the novel do? It tells beautiful, shapely lies which enclose hard, exact truths.
Imagination in these works is equated with empathy; we can't experience all that others have gone through, but we can understand even the most monstrous individuals in works of fiction. A good novel i...