“She liked Victorian novels. They were the only kind of novel you could read while eating an apple.”

“If this were a novel, I'd stop reading right now. I'd throw it across the room.”

“I think that novels that leave out technology misrepresent life as badly as Victorians misrepresented life by leaving out sex.”

“Reading a good long novel is in many ways like having a long and satisfying affair”

“No novels, since you just read them once and never again.”

“If I could read your mind love
What a tale your thoughts could tell
Just like a paperback novel just like the kind a drug store would sell
When you reach the part where the heart aches come the hero would be me
But heroes often fail
And you won't read that book again because the endings just too hard to take..”

“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.”

“Not a single sentence could move her heart. Not a story, a novel or even a poem. Even if she really had a heart, she could not love.”

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

“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.”