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By its very nature, the novel indicates that we are becoming. There is no final solution. There is no last word. -
Carlos Fuentes
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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. -
Janet Frame
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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. -
Edward M Forster
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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. -
George Eliot
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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. -
William Golding
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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. -
Don Delillo
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Writing a novel is actually searching for victims. As I write I keep looking for casualties. The stories uncover the casualties. -
John Irving
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There is no longer any such thing as fiction or nonfiction; there's only narrative. -
E L Doctorow
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When writing a novel a writer should create living people; people not characters. A character is a caricature. -
Ernest Hemingway
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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. -
Ernest Hemingway
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Although our productions have afforded more extensive and unaffected pleasure than those of any other literary corporation in the world, no species of composition has been so much decried. ''And what are you reading, Miss -- -?'' ''Oh! it is only a novel!'' replies the young lady; while she lays down her book with affected indifference, or momentary shame. ''It is only Cecilia, or Camilla, or Belinda ''; or, in short, only some work in which the greatest powers of the mind are displayed, in which the most thorough knowledge of human nature, the happiest delineation of its varieties, the liveliest effusions of wit and humor, are conveyed to the world in the best chosen language. -
Jane Austen
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The only reason for the existence of a novel is that it does attempt to represent life. -
Henry James
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It's with bad sentiments that one makes good novels. -
Aldous Huxley
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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. -
Wallace Stevens
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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
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The time-honored bread-sauce of the happy ending. -
Henry James
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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. -
W Somerset Maugham
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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. -
J G Ballard
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Undermining experience, embellishing experience, rearranging and enlarging experience into a species of mythology. -
Philip Roth
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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. -
Luigi Pirandello
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