29 Novel Quotes

In order for a long piece of work to engage a novelist over an extended period of time, it has to deal with questions that you find very important, that you're trying to work out.

There's an expectation these days that novels - like any other consumer product - should be made on a production line, with one dropping from the conveyor belt every couple of years.

I regard this novel as a work without redeeming social value, unless it can be recycled as a cardboard box.

A novel that does not uncover a hitherto unknown segment of existence is immoral. Knowledge is the novel's only morality.

A novelist may lose his readers for a few pages; a playwright never dares lose his audience for a minute.

Lolita is one of our finest American novels, a triumph of style and vision, an unforgettable work, Nabokov's best (though not most characteristic) work, a wedding of Swiftian satirical vigor with the kind of minute, loving patience that belongs to a man infatuated with the visual mysteries of the world.

Well, that glove's fulla vaseline. Vaseline? What the hell for? Well, I tell ya what - Curley says he's keepin' that hand soft for his wife.' Ch. 2, p.29

Machado de Assis is almost certainly the greatest of all Portuguese-language novelists. He is also a novelist far ahead of his time. There is little in the twentieth-century novel that his subtle, ingenious and sardonic technical procedures do not anticipate. His style - elegant, cool, always restrained - is unsurpassed in the Portuguese language.

In a revolution, as in a novel, the most difficult part to invent is the end.

The only obligation to which in advance we may hold a novel without incurring the accusation of being arbitrary, is that it be interesting.

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

A good novelist, or so I have been taught in China, should be above all else tse ran, that is, natural, unaffected, and so flexible and variable as to be wholly at the command of the material that flows through him. His whole duty is only to sort life as it flows through him, and in the vast fragmentariness of time and space and event to discover essential and inherent order and rhythm and shape. We should never be able, merely by reading pages, to know who wrote them, for when the style of a novelist becomes fixed, that style becomes his prison. The Chinese novelists varied their writing to accompany like music their chosen themes.

She had a lot of face and chin. She had pewter-colored hair set in a ruthless permanent, a hard beak, and large moist eyes with the sympathetic expression of wet stones.

The mystery story is a kind of writing that need not dwell in the shadow of the past and owes little if any allegiance to the cult of the classics. It is a good deal more than unlikely that any writer now living will produce a better historical novel than Henry Esmond, a better tale of children than The Golden Age, a sharper social vignette than Madame Bovary, a more graceful and elegant evocation than The Spoils of Poynton, a wider and richer canvas than War and Peace or The Brothers Karamazov. But to devise a more plausible mystery than The Hound of the Baskervilles or The Purloined Letter should not be too difficult. Nowadays it would be rather more difficult not to.

There are no 'classics' of crime and detection. Not one. Within its frame of reference, which is the only way it should be judged, a classic is a piece of writing which exhausts the possibilities of its form and can never be surpassed. No story or novel of mystery has done that yet. Few have come close. Which is one of the principal reasons why otherwise reasonable people continue to assault the citadel.

A moving tale of the modern soul, and a fine detective story of a man in search of himself. Beautifully, lucidly written, it offers a large challenge and an equal reward. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance is one Harley of a book.

Choke (novel)

Diary (novel)

Mansfield Park (1814)

Northanger Abbey (1817)

Pudd'nhead Wilson (1894)