Quotes about novel
page 4

“[On his process for writing novels:] I can't imagine what the first sentence is, I can't imagine where I want the reader to enter the story, if I don't know where the reader is going to leave the story. So once I know what the last thing the reader hears is, I can work my way backward, like following a roadmap in reverse.”

John Irving (1942) American novelist and screenwriter

A modern novelist of Dickensian tradition, Spotlight, Russia Today, January 24, 2009 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ost0Gyl2V1I,

Way, Imagination

“I'm just trying to look at something without blinking, to see what it is like, or it could have been like, and how that had something to do with the way we live now. Novels are always inquiries for me.”

Toni Morrison (1931–2019) American writer

Interview in Salon magazine ( 2 February 1998) http://web.archive.org/web/20000301183409/http://www.salon.com/books/int/1998/02/cov_si_02int.html

Way

“Anything whatsoever may become the subject of a novel, provided only that it happens in this mundane life and not in some fairyland beyond our human ken.”

Arthur Waley (1889–1966) British academic

Source: Translations, The Tale of Genji (1925–1933), Ch. 25: 'The Glow-Worm'

Life

“I think that physics is about escaping the prison of the received thoughts and searching for novel ways of thinking the world, about trying to clear a bit the misty lake of insubstantial dreams, which reflect reality like the lake reflects the mountains.”

Carlo Rovelli Quantum gravity

Source: Quantum gravity (2004), p. xvii

World, Dreams, Way, Search

“Every fall I imagine once again that something wonderful will happen at a party. This is like imagining that the telephone book will prove to be a wonderful novel.”

John Leonard (1939–2008) American critic, writer, and commentator

"Perfect Knowledge in Final Things" (p. 108)
Private Lives in the Imperial City (1979)

Books, Imagination

“People love actors. They love reading about them and thinking about their lives. But they also secretly hate them. They think their lives are frivolous and all they do is go to parties, and they don't know real problems… There's something at the root of our love-hate relationship with celebrity that I think has the makings, if you could do it in a really substantive way, of a great modern American novel.”

Ethan Hawke (1970) American actor and writer

The Observer http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2002/sep/08/fiction.features (2002-09-08) 2000&ndash;2004

Love, Hate, People, Way

“It was a misunderstanding to stress the dream like quality of the novels. What I meant to stress was the interrelation between dream and life, between dream and action.”

Anaïs Nin book The Novel of the Future

The Novel of the Future (1969)

Life, Dreams

“His consolation in those hours when he was most uncharitable to himself is that taken at his very worst he was at least still worthy of being a character in a novel by Balzac, win one day, lose the next, and do it with boom! and baroque in the style.”

Norman Mailer (1923–2007) American novelist, journalist, essayist, playwright, film maker, actor and political candidate

Armies of the Night (1968)

“"The Lucky One" is at its heart a romance novel, elevated however by Nicholas Sparks' persuasive storytelling. Readers don't read his books because they're true, but because they ought to be true. You can easily imagine how many ways this story would probably go wrong in real life, but who wants to see a movie where a Marine leans over to pick up a photo and is blown up? And a mom trying to raise her son and feed lots of hungry dogs while her abusive ex-husband gets drunk and hangs around? That kind of stuff is too close to life.”

Roger Ebert (1942–2013) American film critic, author, journalist, and TV presenter

Review https://web.archive.org/web/20120505180249/http://rogerebert.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20120418/REVIEWS/120419985/1001 of The Lucky One (18 April 2012) Reviews, Two-and-a-half star reviews

Life, Books, Dogs, Way

“The original dispute was one of poetic diction… From an interest in the minor problem of poetic diction I was led to see that the problem was really one of a suitable medium for all branches of Chinese literature. The question now became: In what language shall the New China produce its future literature? My answer was: The classical language, so long dead, can never be the medium of a living literature of a living nation; the future literature of China must be written in the living language of the people. "No dead language can produce a living literature." And the living language I proposed as the only possible medium of the future literature of China, was the pei-hau, the vulgar tongue of the vast majority of the population, the language which, in the last 500 years, had produced the numerous novels read and loved by the people, though despised by the men of letters. I wanted this much despised vulgar tongue of the people and the novels to be elevated to the position of the national language of China, to the position enjoyed by all the modern national languages in Europe.”

Hu Shih (1891–1962) Chinese philosopher, essayist and diplomat

The Chinese Renaissance (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1934), p. 50

Love, Men, People, Literature

“It seemed strange to me that someone who painted big, scary abstractions should have been so commonsensical in her literary tastes, though later I would discover that twelve-tone composers read Keats just as experimental poets listened to Glenn Miller — few people are avant-garde outside their own domain.I suppose that as Midwesterners, the children of chemical engineers and homemakers, we experienced the arts as so foreign, even so preposterously unreasonable, that once we’d decided to embrace them we did so with lots of conviction and little discrimination. Surely it was no accident that T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, the two great poetic synthesists of our day, the very men who had ransacked all of world culture and could refer in the same poem to the Buddha and to Sophocles or to Confucius and to Jefferson — it was no accident that they were both from the heartland. Public-library intellectuals, magpies of knowledge, like most autodidacts we were incapable of evaluating our sources. As a teen-ager, I tried to write verse like Milton’s; later, I wanted to write novels like Nabokov’s. In a novel I wrote in college, I imitated Evelyn Waugh. If someone had said to me, "But do you, the graceless son of a Cincinnati broker of chemical equipment, do you seriously imagine that you can just write a Renaissance Christian epic or something in the style of a Cambridge-educated Russian aristocrat or of the spokesman of the Bright Young Things of London circa 1925?"”

Edmund White (1940) American novelist and LGBT essayist

if someone had spoken like this to me, I wouldn’t even have understood his point. My Women.The New Yorker https://archive.is/20121204150452/www.newyorker.com/fact/content/articles/050613fa_fact 6 June 2005 Articles and Interviews

Men, Children, People, World

“Only six months ago, I discovered that, over the years, some cubby-hole editors at Ballantine Books, fearful of contaminating the young, had, bit by bit, censored some 75 separate sections from the novel. Students, reading the novel which, after all, deals with the censorship and book-burning in the future, wrote to tell me of this exquisite irony. Judy-Lynn Del Rey, one of the new Ballantine editors, is having the entire book reset and republished this summer with all the damns and hells back in place.”

Ray Bradbury book Fahrenheit 451

Fahrenheit 451 (1953), Coda (1979)

Books, Fear, Hell, Reading

“Let us get down to fundamentals. Is this an open, or is this a closed society? Is it a society where men can preach ideas - novel, unorthodox, heresies, to established churches and established governments - where there is a constant contest for men's hearts and minds on the basis of what is right, of what is just, of what is in the national interests, or is it a closed society where the mass media - the newspapers, the journals, publications, TV, radio - either bound by sound or by sight, or both sound and sight, men's minds are fed with a constant drone of sycophantic support for a particular orthodox political philosophy? I am talking of the principle of the open society, the open debate, ideas, not intimidation, persuasion not coercion…”

Lee Kuan Yew (1923–2015) First Prime Minister of Singapore

Lee Kuan Yew, Before Singapore's independence, Malaysian Parliamentary Debates, Dec 18, 1964
1960s

Men, Idea, Support, Heart

“Beautifully written… the webs of imagery that Harris has so carefully woven… contains writing of which our best writers would be proud… there is not a singly ugly or dead sentence…' - or so sang the critics. Hannibal is a genre novel, and all genre novels contain dead sentences - unless you feel the throb of life in such periods as 'Tommaso put the lid back on the cooler' or 'Eric Pickford answered' or 'Pazzi worked like a man possessed' or 'Margot laughed in spite of herself' or 'Bob Sneed broke the silence.' What these commentators must be thinking of, I suppose, are the bits when Harris goes all blubbery and portentous (every other phrase a spare tyre), or when, with a fugitive poeticism, he swoons us to a dying fall: 'Starling looked for a moment through the wall, past the wall, out to forever and composed herself…' 'It seemed forever ago…' 'He looked deep, deep into her eyes…' 'His dark eyes held her whole…' Needless to say, Harris has become a serial murderer of English sentences, and Hannibal is a necropolis of prose.”

Martin Amis (1949) Welsh novelist

Review of Hannibal by Thomas Harris, p. 240
The War Against Cliché: Essays and Reviews 1971-2000 (2001)

Life, Feeling, Thinking, Silence

“My current novel, Pallas, is all about that culture war - in fact it's been called the Uncle Tom's Cabin of the Sagebrush Rebellion - and yet what I hear all too often from libertarians is that they don't read fiction.”

L. Neil Smith (1946) American writer

"Merchants of Fear" http://www.lneilsmith.org/merchant.html Presented to the Boulder County Libertarian Party, 20 February 1994.

War, Reading

“As far as “plot” goes, as I get older I more and more suspect that “plot” is really being used, in the many incarnations of this argument, as a placeholder for a whole cloud of qualities found (or not found) in certain narratives, some of which actually constitute “plot” and many of which do not. What first led me to suspect this is the fact that many of the sternest exponents of “I want novels to have plots, dammit” are also demonstrably fans of, for instance, quite a few Robert A. Heinlein novels whose plots can barely be detected even by advanced scientific equipment. (Not just later Heinlein, either; go back and look at Beyond This Horizon). As it happens, I like some of those books, too, and what I learn from them, and from thousands of other books, is that what matters isn’t the presence of a carefully-engineered, structurally sound “plot.” What matters is whether a book entrances us into reading it or forces us to decode it — and “plot” is just one of several methods of getting us into the reading trance. It’s a good method. It’s not the only one.”

Patrick Nielsen Hayden (1959) American science fiction editor, fanzine publisher, essayist, reviewer, anthologist, and teacher

"Oh No Lev Grossman No", in Making Light (30 August 2009)

Books, Learning, Reading

“I still couldn’t accept that this was not some nightmare, like some freak misbinding in a book, a Lawrence novel become, at the turn of a page, one by Kafka.”

John Fowles book Daniel Martin

Daniel Martin (1977)

Books

“The work organization of the new seam was, to us, a novel phenomenon consisting of relatively autonomous groups interchanging roles and shifts and regulating their affairs with a minimum of supervision. Cooperation between task groups was everywhere in evidence, personal commitment obvious, absenteeism low, accidents infrequent, productivity high. The contrast was large between the atmosphere and arrangements on these faces and those in the conventional areas of the pit, where the negative features characteristic of the industry were glaringly apparent. The men told us that in order to adapt with best advantage to the technical conditions in the new seam, they had evolved a form of work organization based on practices common in the unmechanized days when small groups, who took responsibility for the entire cycle, had worked autonomously.”

Eric Trist (1909–1993) British scientist

Source: The evolution of socio-technical systems, (1981), p. 8

Men, Personality

“Terry Pratchett and I met in February 1985, in a Chinese restaurant. I was a young journalist. He was a former journalist and Electricity Board PR, and a writer who had just published his second Discworld novel. I was the first journalist who had ever interviewed him.
I remember we made each other laugh a lot. We laughed at the same things. We became friends. It was easy.”

Neil Gaiman (1960) English fantasy writer

Good Omens: How Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett wrote a book (2014)

“The progress of science, of good science, depends on novel ideas and on intellectual freedom: science has very often been advanced by outsiders (remember that Bohr and Einstein regarded themselves as outsiders).”

Paul Karl Feyerabend (1924–1994) Austrian-born philosopher of science

How To Defend Society Against Science (1975)

Idea, Freedom, Science, Dependency

“Much like the French (or like ourselves, their apes),
Who with strange habit do disguise their shapes;
Who loving novels, full of affectation,
Receive the manners of each other nation.”

Guillaume de Salluste Du Bartas (1544–1590) French writer

First Week, Second Day. Compare: "Report of fashions in proud Italy, Whose manners still our apish nation Limps after in base imitation", William Shakespeare, Richard II, act ii. sc. 1.
La Semaine; ou, Création du monde (1578)

Love

“No one goes to the toilet in novels. You'd think none of us had bladders.”

Germaine Greer (1939) Australian feminist author

Newsnight Review (2009-07-24)

Thinking

“As Kurt Vonnegut pointed out in his first novel, Player Piano, some people love problem-solving and tinkering—and that is the final, irreducible driver of human history. Wars and faiths and leaders come and go, but the problem-solvers’ slow, steady work is the fulcrum upon which history turns.”

Gregory Benford (1941) Science fiction author and astrophysicist

Afterword to Nooncoming, p. 104
In Alien Flesh (1986)

Love, War, People, Faith

“What used to be called a Canadian novel was a kind of prairie frontier story, but it was phony. In the plot, people came to the land; the land loved them; they worked and struggled and had lots of children. There was a Frenchman who talked funny and a greenhorn from England who was a fancy-pants but when it came to the crunch he was all courage. Those novels would make you retch.”

Robertson Davies (1913–1995) Canadian journalist, playwright, professor, critic, and novelist

On the generic Canadian novel, in the New York Times (29 December 1988).

Love, Children, People, Courage

“Who now reads novels as a guide to life and love? Everyone wants to star in his or her own movie.”

Frederic Raphael (1931) British writer

Halliwell's Who's Who in the Movies (2001 ed.): Art. "Frederic Raphael", p. 363

Love, Life, Star, Reading

“Something new is wanted. A new novel, perhaps. Something the ten-percenters don't have their hooks into yet. Those soul-fuckers should all be killed.”

Hunter S. Thompson (1937–2005) American journalist and author

Letter to William J. Kennedy (12 July 1967), p. 630
1990s, The Proud Highway : The Fear and Loathing Letters Volume I (1997)

Soul

“The novel, the novel proper that is, is about people's treatment of each other, and so it is about human values.”

Iris Murdoch Sartre: Romantic Rationalist

Source: Sartre: Romantic Rationalist (1953), Ch. 10, p. 138

People

“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.”

Raymond Chandler book The Simple Art of Murder

Introduction
The Simple Art of Murder (1950)

People, Way

“Union of civilizations of the East and the West is a good example of the mentioned fact; this union has brought a new civilization into the world which is distinct from its original resources. It is a tangible example of distinction of the antique and appearance of the novel.”

Elia M. Ramollah (1973) founder and leader of the El Yasin Community

360 Doctrines and Comprehensive Theories, Union of Civilizations

World, Appearance

“So OK. Let’s say you know the novel, you agree with Ayn Rand, you’re an objectivist or a libertarian, and you’ve been waiting eagerly for this movie. Man, are you going to get a letdown. It’s not enough that a movie agree with you, in however an incoherent and murky fashion. It would help if it were like, you know, entertaining?”

Roger Ebert (1942–2013) American film critic, author, journalist, and TV presenter

Review http://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/atlas-shrugged-2011 of Atlas Shrugged: Part I (14 April 2011) Reviews, One-star reviews

Fashion, Waiting, Help

“[The art of the novel] does not simply consist in the author's telling a story about the adventures of some other person. On the contrary, it happens because the storyteller's own experience of men and things, whether for good or ill—not only what he has passed through himself, but even events which he has only witnessed or been told of—has moved him to an emotion so passionate that he can no longer keep it shut up in his heart.”

Murasaki Shikibu book The Tale of Genji

Source: Tale of Genji, The Tale of Genji, trans. Arthur Waley, Ch. 25: The Glow-Worm

Men, Art, Passion, Heart

“All novels are about certain minorities: the individual is a minority. The universal in the novel—and isn't that what we're all clamoring for these days?—is reached only through the depiction of the specific man in a specific circumstance.”

Ralph Ellison (1914–1994) American novelist, literary critic, scholar and writer

"The Art of Fiction: An Interview" (The Paris Review, Spring 1955), in The Collected Essays, ed. John F. Callahan (New York: Modern Library, 1995), p. 212.

Universe

“I was heavily influenced by my first attempt at a novel. I started a fantasy novel back in high school, and…. well… it really sucked. It was a plotless, clichéd mess. When I sat down to write this book, I wanted to make something much, much better. I wanted to write something that was pretty much the opposite of that first novel.
Also, I read Cyrano De Bergerac, right before I started writing the book. Cyrano's character reminded me of some important things, namely, what it really means to be a tragic hero. You don't need a lot of the cliché fantasy trappings to have that cool character.
I also read Giacomo Casanova's memoirs soon after starting this project. That opened my eyes to how interesting an autobiography could be, provided the person telling it has a way with words and has lived a sufficiently adventurous life….”

Patrick Rothfuss (1973) American fantasy writer

Interview with Fantasy Book Critic (25 May 2007) http://fantasybookcritic.blogspot.com/2007/03/interview-with-patrick-rothfuss.html

Life, Books, School, Way

“The novels and poems which proceed from writers in the grip of this barren pessimism are of the kind which make narrow moralists fume, and use words like "decadence"; the writers rejoice, because making narrow moralists (who are usually frightened people) hop with rage is a sign that they have hit a mark, and they do not understand how poor and easy a mark it is.”

Robertson Davies book A Voice from the Attic

A Voice from the Attic (1960)

People, Understanding, Rage

“p. 651Abstract. Investigations of the function of consciousness in human information processing have focused mainly on two questions: (1) where does consciousness enter into the information processing sequence and (2) how does conscious processing differ from preconscious and unconscious processing. Input analysis is thought to be initially "preconscious," "pre-attentive," fast, involuntary, and automatic. This is followed by "conscious," "focal-attentive" analysis which is relatively slow, voluntary, and flexible. It is thought that simple, familiar stimuli can be identified preconsciously, but conscious processing is needed to identify complex, novel stimuli. Conscious processing has also been thought to be necessary for choice, learning and memory, and the organization of complex, novel responses, particularly those requiring planning, reflection, or creativity. The present target article reviews evidence that consciousness performs none of these functions. Consciousness nearly always results from focal-attentive processing (as a form of output) but does not itself enter into this or any other form of human information processing. This suggests that the term "conscious process" needs re-examination. Consciousness appears to be necessary in a variety of tasks because they require focal-attentive processing; if consciousness is absent, focal-attentive processing is absent. Viewed from a first-person perspective, however, conscious states are causally effective. First-person accounts are complementary to third-person accounts. Although they can be translated into third-person accounts, they cannot be reduced to them.”

Max Velmans (1942) British psychologist

Is human information processing conscious?, 1991

Question, Learning, Appearance, Memory

“I had gone thoroughly through some of the all-fiction magazines and I made up my mind that if people were paid for writing such rot as I read I could write stories just as rotten. Although I had never written a story, I knew absolutely that I could write stories just as entertaining and probably a lot more so than any I chanced to read in those magazines.
I knew nothing about the technique of story writing, and now, after eighteen years of writing, I still know nothing about the technique, although with the publication of my new novel, Tarzan and the Lost Empire, there are 31 books on my list. I had never met an editor, or an author or a publisher. l had no idea of how to submit a story or what I could expect in payment. Had I known anything about it at all I would never have thought of submitting half a novel; but that is what I did.
Thomas Newell Metcalf, who was then editor of The All-Story magazine, published by Munsey, wrote me that he liked the first half of a story I had sent him, and if the second half was as good he thought he might use it. Had he not given me this encouragement, I would never have finished the story, and my writing career would have been at an end, since l was not writing because of any urge to write, nor for any particular love of writing. l was writing because I had a wife and two babies, a combination which does not work well without money.”

Edgar Rice Burroughs (1875–1950) American writer

How I Wrote the Tarzan Books (1929)

Love, Money, People, Books

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

Ellen Goodman (1941) American journalist and writer

Attributed

Box

“Great fiction shows us not how to conduct our behavior but how to feel. Eventually, it may show us how to face our feelings and face our actions and to have new inklings about what they mean. A good novel of any year can initiate us into our own new experience.”

Eudora Welty (1909–2001) American author

On Writing (2002)

Behavior, Feeling

“It makes me itchy, this wry fatalism, but it doesn't make me itch nearly as much as the heroes of so many other modern novels for whom stalking the savage libido is more fun than kinship or community; who will leave town either to find their callow selves, as if they'd lost anything important, or, more transgressively, to kill a bear, a bull, a whale, a unicorn, a hippogriff, a signifier or, preferably, their fathers.”

John Leonard (1939–2008) American critic, writer, and commentator

"The Accidental Matriarch" http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9A07E6DB133BF933A15756C0A9679C8B63&sec=&spon=&pagewanted=3, The New York Times (20 May 2001)

Communication

“The so-called obscurity of modernist literature has, of course, a lot to do with the new stress on exegesis. When the overt meaning of a work can no longer be taken for granted, criticism is forced — or seems forced — to undertake the explication of the text of the work before doing anything else. But experience has shown us by now that the drift and shape of an "obscure" poem or novel can be grasped for the purposes of art without being "worked out." Part of the triumph of modernist poetry is, indeed, to have demonstrated the great extent to which verse can do without explicit meaning and yet not sacrifice anything essential to its effect as art. Here, as before, successful art can be depended upon to explain itself.”

Clement Greenberg (1909–1994) American writer and artist

"T.S. Eliot: A Book Review" (1950/1956), p. 244
1960s, Art and Culture: Critical Essays, (1961)

Art, Literature, Success, Parting

“I've made my best notes sitting outside cafes on busy streets, or in murky bars in foreign cities. I sorted out a big series of problems in the novel I'm just finishing while sitting drinking a long line of solitary beers in a bar in a small coastal town. The hangover was pretty brutal, but I'm not sure I'd have found the solutions any other way. Part of the job of being a writer is learning how your head works - when to push it, when to step back. This kind of self-management is actually far harder, I think, than learning how to write decent prose.”

Michael Marshall Smith (1965) British novelist, screenwriter and short story writer

Associated Content Interview (October 23, 2006)

Way, Drink, Beer, Business

“I reread that book in the summer of '03.... And I hadn't looked at that book either since '91. And I was dreading it. I thought it was going to be a really terrible novel. Everything everyone had ever said about it was going to be true.... And I started reading it… and I was surprised. It was good. It was fun. It was not nearly as pretentious as I remember I wanted it to be when I was writing it. Not nearly as weighted down with the importance that I thought I was investing it with. I found it really fast-moving. I found it really funny. And I liked it a lot. The violence was… it made my toes curl. I really freaked out. I couldn't believe how violent it was. It was truly upsetting. I had to steel myself to reread those passages.”

Bret Easton Ellis (1964) American novelist

On American Psycho http://www.amazon.com/gp/feature.html?docId=571852

Books, Reading, Summer

“I could have kept [writing "Irish" novels such as Birchwood] and probably had a good deal more success than I did, especially on this side of the Atlantic. But you have to try to do many things. You have to try to do things that you actually think you're incapable of.”

John Banville (1945) Irish writer

Once More Admired Than Bought, A Writer Finally Basks in Success (1990)

Thinking, Success

“In recent years, many men of science have come to realize that the scientific picture of the world is a partial one — the product of their special competence in mathematics and their special incompetence to deal systematically with aesthetic and moral values, religous experiences and intuitions of significance. Unhappily, novel ideas become acceptable to the less intelligent members of society only with a very considerable time-lag. Sixty or seventy years ago the majority of scientists believed — and the belief caused them considerable distress — that the product of their special incompetence was identical with reality as a whole. Today this belief has begun to give way, in scientific circles, to a different and obviously truer conception of the relation between science and total experience.”

Aldous Huxley book Ends and Means

Ends and Means (1937)

Men, World, Way, Intelligence

“The terrorist kills because he cannot compete with his adversaries. Instead of responding to Salman Rushdie’s ill-structured and unreadable novel with a novel that is well-plotted and properly written, the terrorist calls for his murder. The terrorist cannot challenge Theo van Gogh’s controversial documentary with a better one and thus decides to stab him to death. The history of contemporary Islamist terrorism is full of instances of cold-blooded murder ordered by those who could not compete in literary, political, social or even theological fields against those better than them. With the advent of globalisation, Islamist terrorism is now able to strike beyond the frontiers of the Muslim world. But the same lazy mentality is at work. The terrorist knows that he is incapable of building an alternative civilisation capable of competing with the one he despises. So he tries to destroy what becomes the cause of his humiliation.”

Amir Taheri (1942) Iranian journalist

"Terrorism Cannot Win: This is Why", Elaph.com, (January 16, 2014).

Death, World, History

“Barchester Towers has become one of those novels which do not die quite at once, which live and are read for perhaps a quarter of a century.”

Anthony Trollope (1815–1882) English novelist (1815-1882)

Source: An Autobiography (1883), Ch. 6

Reading

“Our understanding of the four basic concepts of Physics -- space, time, matter and force -- has undergone radical change in the course of work on unification, starting with Maxwell's unification of electricity with magnetism, all the way to present day string theory. What started as four independent concepts, with space and time postulated and the possible forms of matter and force arbitrarily chosen, now appear as different aspects of a rich and novel dynamically determined structure.”

Peter Freund (1936–2018) American physicist

Physics and Geometry, a paper written for the Symposium on Theoretical Physics at the University of Helsinki, Helsinki, Finland on August 28, 2003 and at the Freydoon Mansouri Memorial Session of the 3rd International Symposium on Quantum Theory and Symmetries at the University of Cincinnati, Cincinnati, OH, on September 13, 2003. Report #EFI03-47.

Way, Understanding, Appearance, Change

“Every novel is an ideal plane inserted into the realm of reality.”

Jorge Luis Borges book Labyrinths

"Partial Magic in the Quixote", Labyrinths (1964)

Reality

“We have ranged over all the main phases of human information processing - from information encoding, storage, retrieval, and transformation to output. We have considered the role of consciousness in the analysis and selection of stimuli, in learning and memory, and in the production of voluntary responses, including those requiring planning and creativity.
In one sense, each of these tasks may be "conscious" (if it is at the focus of attention). We may be conscious of the stimuli that we analyze and select for more detailed attention, conscious of what we learn and commit to memory, and conscious of the responses we make to such stimuli. When the required responses are complex or novel we may be aware of devoting effort to planning and monitoring their execution. In reflective thought or problem solving we may have some awareness of internal processing in the form of thoughts, emotions, images, and so forth. Whether consciousness is necessary for such processing, however, is a different matter.”

Max Velmans (1942) British psychologist

Partly cited in: W.S. Robinson (2006). "Epiphenomenalism." Encyclopedia of Cognitive Science.
Is human information processing conscious?, 1991

Problem, Sense, Effort, Learning

“The point is, that the function of the novel seems to be changing; it has become an outpost of journalism; we read novels for information about areas of life we don’t know — Nigeria, South Africa, the American army, a coal-mining village, coteries in Chelsea, etc. We read to find out what is going on. One novel in five hundred or a thousand has the quality a novel should have to make it a novel — the quality of philosophy.”

Doris Lessing book The Golden Notebook

Anna Wulf, in "Free Women: 1"
The Golden Notebook (1962)

Life, Change, Reading

“Few novels or plays could exist without at least one troublemaker in the group, and perhaps life couldn’t either.”

Mignon McLaughlin (1913–1983) American journalist

The Complete Neurotic's Notebook (1981), Theater

Life

“Whatever became of Kurt Schwitters' novel 'Franz Müllers Drahtfrühling' [Franz Müller's Wire Spring] several chapters of which we composed together? Is it buried under the bomb ruins of his house on Waldhausenstrasse in Hannover? For hours, Schwitters and I sat together and spun dialogue, in rhapsody. He took these writings and channeled them into his novel…We sat together again, writing 'Franz Müllers Drahtfrühling':
H. A.: The nightingales have had enough of your hymnal Karagösen. Play violin on parrots, but avoid the women red hood ans snow widow.
K. Schw.: Should I pe-trify something for you? Or would you like play cry together?
H. A.: Should we wash our tears or drown them?
K. Schw.: You are a sipsnipper, Since when do your diamonds bark?
H. A.: The water is getting hard. A fruit cries out loud and gives birth to a fish.
K. Schw.: I'll p-ut it in the sea, or should I st-ab you with it?”

Hans Arp (1886–1966) Alsatian, sculptor, painter, poet and abstract artist

Dialogue between Hans Arp and Kurt Schwitters, (1956) with introduction in: Franz Müllers Drahtfrühling-- Memories of Kurt Schwitters; as quoted in I is Style, ed. Siegfried Gohr & Gunda Luyken, commissioned by w:Rudi Fuchs, 2000, pp. 139-140
1950s

Women, Spring, Birth, Fish

“Game theory, analyzing in a novel mathematical framework, rational competition between two or more antagonists for maximum gain and minimum loss.”

Ludwig von Bertalanffy (1901–1972) austrian biologist and philosopher

General System Theory (1968), 4. Advances in General Systems Theory

Game, Mathematics, Loss

“On a novel plan, I have combined the historical progress with the scientific developement of the subject; and endeavoured to lay down and inculcate the principles of the Calculus, whilst I traced its gradual and successive improvements…. there is little doubt, the student's curiosity and attention will be more excited and sustained, when he finds history blended with science, and the demonstration of formulae accompanied with the object and the causes of their invention, than by a mere analytical exposition of the principles of the subject. He will have an opportunity of observing how a calculus, from simple beginnings, by easy steps, and seemingly the slightest improvements, is advanced to perfection; his curiosity too, may be stimulated to an examination of the works of the contemporaries of Newton; works once read and celebrated: yet the writings of the Bernoullis are not antiquated from loss of beauty, nor deserve neglect…”

Robert Woodhouse (1773–1827) English mathematician

Preface p. iv-v
A Treatise on Isoperimetrical Problems, and the Calculus of Variations (1810)

Beauty, History, Science, Loss

“Thou shalt not make unto thee any ideal, neither of an angel in heaven, nor of a hero in a poem or novel, nor one that is dreamed up or imagined: rather shalt thou love a man as he is.”

Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel (1772–1829) German poet, critic and scholar

Du sollst dir kein Ideal machen, weder eines Engels im Himmel, noch eines Helden aus einem Gedicht oder Roman, noch eines selbstgeträumten oder fantasirten; sondern du sollst einen Mann lieben, wie er ist.
Philosophical Fragments, P. Firchow, trans. (1991), “Athenaeum Fragments,” § 364

Love, Dreams, Angels, Imagination

“Moral philosophy is very largely a branch of fiction. Despite this, a philosopher has yet to write a great novel. The fact should not be surprising. In philosophy the truth about human life is of no interest.”

John Gray book Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals

The Vices of Morality: Immoral Amorality (p. 109)
Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals (2002)

Life, Truth

“No, I don’t think it’s correct to define my writing as fables. There are themes, yes, but I’m not trying to offer some categorical cure-it-all to the problematic situation of Man. I’m neither theologian nor a politician. My concern in my first novel, The Zoo, was loss of inner life. After long years of writer’s block, the novel just exploded out of me. Thirty days. All too quickly to really do it justice. With my second novel, The Nihilesthete, I was taken by the spiritual diminishment and the all-pervasive powerlessness that I felt was taking over our culture which in turn prevented and inverted my lead character’s full expression. Such is the motive-force behind almost banal, cerebralized cruelties he harbours upon his arch-enemy, the artist, Brodski.”

Richard Kalich novelist

Richard Kalich in conversation with Lucy Sweeney Byrne - Books Go Social http://booksgosocial.com/2015/01/13/richard-kalich-in-conversation-with-lucy-sweeney-byrne/ January 13, 2015.

Life, Justice, Motivation, Thinking

“When a novel department store called Gigantti was opened in the capitol area a year or two ago, which promised gadgets of many colors for the stinking cheap price of 9:90, 99:90, 999:90; the parking field's rafts of metal plated beetles reached the horizon, and the human lines wriggling midst them in tens of thousands surpassed all the records of the good old Soviet Union. As I looked at those newspaper pictures, a tormented scream erupted from my lips: no democracy, for heaven's sake, no democracy! No common voting right, never! No, no, no!”

Pentti Linkola (1932) Finnish ecologist

Thoughts And Memories About The Old Educated Class - A View Into The Century's Ideological History (2000)

Color, Democracy

“It is over twenty years since I first heard of Hong-lou meng and the great fascination it holds for its readers (despite the fact that there has never been a complete or definitive text). I was once lucky enough to borrow a copy from a friend. Reading it (in this incomplete state) was indeed a tantalizing experience.
In the spring of this year, my friend Cheng Weiyuan came to see me and showed me the complete text that he had purchased. 'This,' he said, 'is the fruit of my labours over several years. Bit by bit I have pieced it together, with a view to publishing it for fellow-lovers of the novel. As you are at a bit of a loose end, and in need of a restorative, will you share the labour [of preparing the manuscript for the press] with me?'
Although it was only a novel, the book contained nothing contrary to the tenets of Confucian teaching, and so I gladly accepted, and fell upon the task with the eagerness of the Persian slave when he saw his pearl! Now that the work is done, I have described these circumstances for the reader's information.”

Gao E (writer)

Preface (dated 27 December 1791) to the first Cheng-Gao edition of Dream of the Red Chamber, as translated by John Minford in The Story of the Stone: The Debt of Tears (Penguin, 1979), Appendix I, p. 386

Books, Spring, Lovers, Reading

“As systematic inquiry into the natural facts was begun it was at once found that the accepted ideas of variation were unfounded. Variation was seen very frequently to be a definite and specific phenomenon, affecting different forms of life in different ways, but in all its diversity showing manifold and often obvious indications of regularity. This observation was not in its essence novel. Several examples of definite variation had been well known to Darwin and others, but many, especially Darwin himself in his later years, had nevertheless been disposed to depreciate the significance of such facts. They consequently then lapsed into general disparagement. Upon more careful inquiry the abundance of such phenomena proved to be far greater than was currently supposed, and a discussion of their nature brought into prominence a consideration of greater weight, namely that the differences by which these definite or discontinuous variations are constituted again and again approximate to and are comparable with the class of differences by which species are distinguished from each other.”

William Bateson (1861–1926) British geneticist and biologist

Preface
Problems In Genetics (1913)

Life, Way, Idea, Nature

“Somewhere In Time is the story of a love which transcends time, What Dreams May Come is the story of a love which transcends death. … I feel that they represent the best writing I have done in the novel form.”

Richard Matheson (1926–2013) American fiction writer

Introduction to an Omnibus edition of his work, as quoted in Somewhere in Time (1998), p. 318 - 319

Love, Death, Dreams, Feeling

“At the 2008 Lambda Literary Awards (the awards the LGBT community gives to books ignored by straight book awards) not a single lesbian book nominated for best novel was published by a mainstream press. Our literature is disappearing at the same time we are being told we are winning our rights. How can we be equal citizens if our stories are not allowed to be part of our nation's story?”

Sarah Schulman (1958) American writer

Source: The Gentrification of the Mind: Witness to a Lost Imagination (2012), p. 151

Books, Communication, Literature, Time

“I want to write a novel so profound that it would suffocate a fly.”

Gao Xingjian (1940) Chinese novelist and playwright

Source: Buying a Fishing Rod for My Grandfather (2005), p. 99

Flying

“At present game theory has, in my opinion, two important uses, neither of them related to games nor to conflict directly. First, game theory stimulates us to think about conflict in a novel way. Second, game theory leads to some genuine impasses, that is, to situations where its axiomatic base is shown to be insufficient for dealing even theoretically with certain types of conflict situations… Thus, the impact is made on our thinking process themselves, rather than on the actual content of our knowledge.”

Anatol Rapoport (1911–2007) Russian-born American mathematical psychologist

Source: 1960s, Fights, games, and debates, (1960), p. 242; As cited in: Han Dorussen. " Min beste fagbok: Anatol Rapoport: Fights, Games, and Debates http://www.sv.ntnu.no/iss/issavisa/98-1/bestebok.htm" at sv.ntnu.no, 1998

Way, Game, Knowledge, Thinking

“There are no laws for the novel. There never have been, nor can there ever be.”

Doris Lessing (1919–2013) British novelist, poet, playwright, librettist, biographer and short story writer

As quoted in Writers on Writing (1986) by Jon Winokur

Law

“Why must a novel-writer be either a “realist” or a “romantist”? And, if the latter, why “romanticist” any more than “realisticist”? Why should a good novel not combine romance and reality in just proportions? Is there any reason to suppose that the one element must necessarily shut out the other?”

Francis Marion Crawford (1854–1909) Novelist, short story writer, essayist (1854-1909)

The Novel: What It Is (1893)

Reality

“If there's a stack [of novels to review], the unpromising stuff goes at the top and the promising stuff goes at the bottom. That way, I am eager to finish Overwrought Romantic Mary Sue Fantasy because I know that will let me read Niche Product That Only the Author, James and Some Guy at JPL Likes.”

James Nicoll (1961) Canadian fiction reviewer

[dh3na8$a1u$1@reader1.panix.com, 2005]
2000s

Way, Guy, Reading

“Put down the banks, and if this country could not be carried through the longest war against her most powerful enemy without ever knowing the want of a dollar, without dependence on the traitorous classes of her citizens, without bearing hard on the resources of the people, or loading the public with an indefinite burden of debt, I know nothing of my countrymen. Not by any novel project, not by any charlatanerie, but by ordinary and well-experienced means; by the total prohibition of all private paper at all times, by reasonable taxes in war aided by the necessary emissions of public paper of circulating size, this bottomed on special taxes, redeemable annually as this special tax comes in, and finally within a moderate period.”

Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826) 3rd President of the United States of America

Letter to Albert Gallatin, 1815. http://www.yamaguchy.netfirms.com/7897401/jefferson/gallatin1.html ME 14:356 Posthumous publications, On financial matters

War, People, Time, Dependency

“Of course, Pupkin would never have thought of considering himself on an intellectual par with Mallory Tompkins. That would have been ridiculous. Mallory Tompkins had read all sorts of things and had half a mind to write a novel himself—either that or a play. All he needed, he said, was to have a chance to get away somewhere by himself and think. Every time he went away to the city Pupkin expected that he might return with the novel all finished; but though he often came back with his eyes red from thinking, the novel as yet remained incomplete.”

Stephen Leacock book Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town

Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town (1912)

Thinking, Chance, Time, Reading

“[With] 140 words in Chinese, you really can write a novel. Most of Confucius’s sentences [are] only four words, so 140 words [might] take his whole life to write. And you can discuss the most profound ideas related to democracy, freedom, poetry.”

Ai Weiwei (1957) Chinese concept artist

2010-, Digital Activism in China, 2010

Life, Democracy, Idea, Freedom

“The people of China forged their own literature apart from letters. And today this is what lives, to be part of what is to come, and all the formal literature, which was called art, is dead. The plots of these novels are often incomplete, the love interest is often not brought to solution, heroines are often not beautiful and heroes often are not brave. Nor has the story always an end; sometimes it merely stops, in the way life does, in the middle of it when death is not expected.
In this tradition of the novel have I been born and reared as a writer.”

Pearl S. Buck (1892–1973) American writer

The Chinese Novel (1938)

Love, Life, Death, People

“A very remarkable work… in the present state of light literature in England, a novel that actually tells a story. It 's quite incredible, I know. Try the book. It has another extraordinary merit, it isn't written by a woman.”

Wilkie Collins (1824–1889) British writer

The Works of Wilkie Collins: The Black Robe [P.F. Collier, 1900] (p. 328) Also in Wilkie Collins: A Literary Life by Graham Law & Andrew Maunder [Springer, 2008, ISBN 0-230-22750-3] ( p. 15 https://books.google.com/books?id=kKyHDAAAQBAJ&pg=PA15&f=false)

Books, Literature, Light

“These Chinese novels are not perfect according to Western standards. They are not always planned from beginning to end, nor are they compact, any more than life is planned or compact. They are often too long, too full of incident, too crowded with character, a medley of fact and fiction as to material, and a medley of romance and realism as to method, so that an impossible event of magic or dream may be described with such exact semblance of detail that one is compelled to belief against all reason”

Pearl S. Buck (1892–1973) American writer

The Chinese Novel (1938)

Life, Dreams, Perfection

“Richard Wright, an American novelist of the realist school, asks a famous unfathomable question in his best-known novel, Native Son. Who knows when some slight shock, he asks, disturbing the delicate balance between social order and thirsty aspiration, shall send the skyscrapers in our cities toppling?”

Daniel Handler book The Penultimate Peril

Lemony Snicket (351-352)
The Penultimate Peril (2005)

School, Question

“I have descended to the depths of suffering, and it seems to me that after that one cannot help being raised up. But I have spent the last three nights weeping. Pity! Pity! Remembrance is the true imperishable life... I should like to live my life over again, to record it, to admit my weaknesses; no, this is useless; I have sinned, I have suffered, I have atoned for it. I could write only a bad novel by relating what has been related a thousand times.”

Berthe Morisot (1841–1895) painter from France

Quote from Berthe's Morisot's letter, 1887 - after the death of her husband Eugène Manet
1881 - 1895

Life, Suffering, Time, Help

“I never got used to the way the house Trots fell into the jargon back in Grimsby — I mean, on any other subject, like the death of the novel, or the sex life of the editor's secretary, they spoke ordinary English, but as soon as they started trying to get me to join the strike it was as if their brains had been taken out and replaced by one of those little golf-ball things you get in electric typewriters… "Betrayal"… "Confrontation"… "Management"… My God, you'd need a more supple language than that to describe an argument between two amoebas.”

Tom Stoppard Night and Day

Milne, Act I
Night and Day (1978)

Life, Death, God, Sex

“However could he organize his novel? What form to give it? It is so complex. Too loose, thinks Sam, too scattered.”

Norman Mailer (1923–2007) American novelist, journalist, essayist, playwright, film maker, actor and political candidate

Source: The Man Who Studied Yoga (1956), Ch. 5

Thinking

“The validity of g is most conspicuous in scholastic performance, not because g-loaded tests measure specifically what is taught in school, but because g is intrinsic to learning novel material, grasping concepts, distinctions, and meanings… The most critical tool for scholastic learning beyond the primary grades— reading comprehension—is probably the most highly g-loaded attainment in the course of elementary education.”

Arthur Jensen (1923–2012) professor of educational psychology

Source: The g factor: The science of mental ability (1998), p. 270; As cited in: Melissa A. Bray, Thomas J. Kehle (2011) The Oxford Handbook of School Psychology. p. 65

Education, School, Learning, Reading

“I was once — and only once — asked if I could have had a writing career without the movies. That stopped me, and I was very happy to have to think about it, and decide I knew the answer. Yes; not this career, but a career. Without movie money, either from writing screenplays or selling rights to novels, I could still have enough of a career that I could support myself and not have to work at some other job, but it would be, shall we say, a less lavish lifestyle.”

Donald E. Westlake (1933–2008) American novelist

Blogcritics interview (2007)

Money, Happiness, Support, Thinking

“The critic lives at second hand. He writes about. The poem, the novel, or the play must be given to him; criticism exists by the grace of other men's genius.”

George Steiner (1929–2020) American writer

"Humane Literacy".
Language and Silence: Essays 1958-1966 (1967)

Men

“Literary critics like Lionel Trilling … demand that our novels illuminate the manners and morals of prevailing society. Professor Trilling is right, because otherwise what use are they for us? But he is wrong-headed, because he does not see that the burden of proof is not on the artist but on our society. If such convenient criticism of prevalent life does not get to be written, it is likely that the prevailing society is not inspiring enough; its humanity is not great enough, it does not have enough future, to be worth the novelist’s trouble.”

Paul Goodman book Growing Up Absurd

Source: Growing Up Absurd (1956), p. 214.

Life, Future

“The audience I joined was perhaps 80 percent female. I heard some sniffles and glimpsed some tears, and no wonder. Eat Pray Love is shameless wish-fulfillment, a Harlequin novel crossed with a mystic travelogue, and it mercifully reverses the life chronology of many people, which is Love Pray Eat.”

Roger Ebert (1942–2013) American film critic, author, journalist, and TV presenter

Review http://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/eat-pray-love-2010 of Eat Pray Love (11 Aug 2010) Reviews, Two star reviews

Love, Life, People, Tear

“The unalterable character with which Schopenhauer and sometimes Conrad believed all humans are born may not exist; but we cannot help looking within ourselves to account for what we do. All we find are fragments, like memories of a novel we once read.”

John Gray book Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals

The Deception: Lord Jim's Jump (p. 68)
Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals (2002)

Memory, Reading, Help

“Anything whatsoever may become the subject of a novel, provided only that it happens in this mundane life and not in some fairyland beyond our human ken.”

Murasaki Shikibu book The Tale of Genji

Source: Tale of Genji, The Tale of Genji, trans. Arthur Waley, Ch. 25

Life

“The impulse to write a novel comes from a momentary unified vision of life.”

Angus Wilson (1913–1991) british author

The Wild Garden (London: Secker & Warburg, 1963) p. 149.

Life

“Axiom: Novel must have either one living character or a perfect pattern: fails otherwise.”

E.M. Forster (1879–1970) English novelist

Source: Commonplace Book (1985), p. 6

Perfection

“All this sitting about in cafés to calm down
Simply wears me out. And their idea of literature!
The idiotic cut of the stanzas; the novels, full up, gross.

I have lived it, and I know too much.
My café nerves are breaking me
With black, exhausting information.”

Rosemary Tonks (1928–2014) British poet

The Sofas, Fogs and Cinemas

Literature, Idea

“And all that time I couldn’t work. So much of a novelist’s writing, as I have said, takes place in the unconscious: in those depths the last word is written before the first word appears on the paper. We remember details of our story, we do not invent them. War didn’t trouble those deep sea-caves, but not there was something of infinitely greater importance to me than war, than my novel – the end of love. That was being worked out not, like a story: the pointed word that sent her crying, that seemed to have come so spontaneously to the lips, had been sharpened in those underwater caverns. My novel lagged, but my love hurried like inspiration to the end.”

Graham Greene book The End of the Affair

Bk. 1, ch. 6
The End of the Affair (1951)

Love, War, Appearance, Time

“Gnawing upon our resentment, we stretch out in an iron cage,
Watching the slow passage of days and months.
How we despise the insolent crowd outside,
Standing there foolishy, with tiny eyes bulging,
As they mock the stately spirit of the deep jungle.
Here by misfortune, shamefully caged,
We are no more than a novel sight to amuse them, some plaything…
O stately soul, heroic land,
Vast domain where yesteryear we freely roamed,
We see you no more.
But do you know that during our days of frustration
We follow a great dream, letting our souls race to be near you,
O formidable jungle of ours!”

Thế Lữ (1907–1989)

"Remembering the Jungle: The Words of the Tiger in the Zoo", in Understanding Vietnam by Neil L. Jamieson (University of California Press, 1995), ISBN 978-0520916586, pp. 159–160

Dreams, Soul