“Read history, works of truth, not novels and romances”

“Seminaked men!” Jacky trilled.
“With swords,” Kat purred. “It is a romance novel!”

“A diary with no drawings of me in it? Where are the torrid fantasies? The romance novel covers? The”

“Readers of histories and novels can hardly fail to be struck by their similarities. There are many histories that could pass for novels, and many novels that could pass for histories, considered in purely formal (or, I should say, formalist) terms. Viewed simply as verbal artifacts histories and novels are indistinguishable from one another. We cannot easily distinguish between them on formal grounds unless we approach them with specific preconceptions about the kinds of truths that each is supposed to deal in. But the aim of the writer of a novel must be the same as that of the writer of a history.”

“I read anything that’s going to be interesting. But you don’t know what it is until you’ve read it. Somewhere in a book on the history of false teeth there’ll be the making of a novel.”

“Reading a book is like re-writing it for yourself. You bring to a novel, anything you read, all your experience of the world. You bring your history and you read it in your own terms.”

“Romance novels are birthday cake and life is often peanut butter and jelly. I think everyone should have lots of delicious romance novels lying around for those times when the peanut butter of life gets stuck to the roof of your mouth.”

“The history of the Bible text is a romance of literature,”

“I tried my hand at a novel around college romance, but soon figured out I was no good at it.”

“But the voice of anatomy, like the voice of all nature, never reaches the mental ear of the Great Commoner. It is the novel province of anatomy to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth about the structure, the origin and the history of man.”