The novel doesn’t come into existence until certain methods of reproducing fiction come along.
Leslie Fiedler quote on Existence of the novel
The novel is always pop art, and the novel is always dying. That’s the only way it stays alive. It does really die. I’ve been thinking about that a lot.
Leslie Fiedler quote on The novel as pop art
The novel is the first art form that is an honest-to-god commodity. That’s what makes it different from both high art and folk art.
Leslie Fiedler quote on The novel as first art form
It’s so wrong when I pick up a new edition of Huckleberry Finn and I look at the last page and it doesn’t say, Yours truly, at the end.
Leslie Fiedler quote on Huckleberry Finn
There’s no reason you should write any novel quickly.
John Irving | Novel
The building of the architecture of a novel – the craft of it – is something I never tire of.
John Irving | Architecture of a novel
I don’t want to begin something, I don’t want to write that first sentence until all the important connections in the novel are known to me. As if the story has already taken place, and it’s my responsibility to put it in the right order to tell it to you.
John Irving | important connections in the novel
A good novel tells us the truth about its hero; but a bad novel tells us the truth about its author.
G.K. Chesterton – Novel
Every novel is an ideal plane inserted into the realm of reality.
Borges – Novel
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.
salman Rushdie – Language, Novel
For a novelist, a given historic situation is an anthropologic laboratory in which he explores his basic question: What is human existence?
Milan Kundera – Human Existence
What is essential in a novel is precisely what can only be expressed in a novel, and so every adaptation contains nothing but the non-essential.
Milan Kundera – Novel
Put simply the novel stands between us and the hardening concept of statistical man. There is no other medium in which we can live for so long and so intimately with a character. That is the service a novel renders.
