Quotes about novel
page 6

“Had it merely called to our attention the existence and exact nature of certain fundamental gaps in economic theory, the Theory of Economic Behavior by von Neumann and Morgenstern would have been a book of outstanding importance. But it does more than that. It is essentially constructive: where existing theory is considered to be inadequate, the authors put in its place a highly novel analytical apparatus designed to cope with the problem.
It would be doing the authors an injustice to say that theirs is a contribution to economics only. The scope of the book is much broader. The techniques applied by the authors in tackling economic problems are of sufficient generality to be valid in political science, sociology, or even military strategy. The applicability to games proper (chess and poker) is obvious from the title. Moreover, the book is of considerable interest from a purely mathematical point of view.”

Leonid Hurwicz (1917–2008) Russian-American economist and mathematician

Leonid Hurwicz. "The Theory of Economic Behavior," The American Economic Review, Vol. 35, No. 5 (Dec., 1945), pp. 909: Lead paragraphs of the article

Books, Behavior, Game, Mathematics

“I was so conflicted and disillusioned about organized religion that I couldn't write. … I think my writings will go on being the writings of a believer in Christ. I think I'll be less frustrated and freer to write about the full dimension of what that means. But I write metaphysical thrillers, and how this works out in fiction is always mysterious: characters confront dilemmas. The worldview of the novel is certainly optimistic and that of a believer. What character will say what, I don't know until I start writing. …. Because I had written Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt and Christ the Lord: The Road to Cana, I had become a public Christian. I wanted my readers to know that I was stepping aside from organized religion and the names Christian and Christianity because I wanted to exonerate myself from the things organized religion was doing in the name of Jesus. Christians have lost credibility in America as people who know how to love. They have become associated with hatred, persecution, attempting to abolish the separation of church and state, and trying to pressure people to vote certain ways in elections. I wanted to make it clear that I did not in any way remain complicit with those things.”

Anne Rice (1941) American writer

"Q & A: Anne Rice on Following Christ Without Christianity" interview by Sarah Pulliam Bailey in Christianity Today (17 Augutst 2010) http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/article_print.html?id=89167

Love, People, Religion, Way

“I love nice long walks, inspirational novels of influential people. I'm reading Kennedy - An Unfinished Life at the moment. And nothing beats listening to music and having tea with friends.”

Sangeeta Niranjan Fijian businesswoman

Interview with the Fiji Times, 18 September 2005

Love, Life, People, Music

“The Diary of Vaslav Nijinjsky reaches a limit of sincerity beyond any of the documents that we have referred to on this study. There are other modern works that express the same sense that civilized life is a form of living death; notably the poetry of T. S. Eliot and the novels of Franz Kafka; but there is an element of prophetic denunciation in both, the attitude of healthy men rebuking their sick neighbors. We possess no other record of the Outsider's problems that was written by a man about to be defeated and permanently smashed by those problems.”

Colin Wilson book The Outsider

Source: The Outsider (1956), p. 115

Life, Death, Men, Problem

“The novelist with a prudent prodigality may employ descriptions, dialogues, and episodes, which would be fatal in a drama. Characters may be introduced and dismissed without having any important connection with the plot; it is enough if they serve the purpose of the chapter in which they appear. Although as a matter of fine art no character should have a place in a novel unless it form an integral element of the story, and no episode should be introduced unless it reflects some strong light on the characters or incidents, this is a critical demand which only fine artists think of satisfying, and only delicate tastes appreciate. For the mass of readers it is enough if they are mused; and indeed all readers, no matter how critical their taste, would rather be pleased by a transgression of the law than wearied by prescription. Delight condones offence. The only question for the writer is, whether the offence is so trivial as to be submerged in the delight. And he will do well to remember that the greater flexibility belonging to the novel by no means removes the novel from the laws which rule the drama.”

George Henry Lewes (1817–1878) British philosopher

The Principles of Success in Literature (1865)

Law, Art, Question, Thinking

“But now, coming to your shameless assertion that ministers of the altar should be allowed to marry, I consider it superfluous to unsheathe the sword of my own words against you, since we see the armed forces of the whole Church and the massed array of all the holy Fathers ready to resist you. And where so great a host of heavenly troops opposes you, one can only wonder that your novel and rash attempt at doctrine does not submit when confronted by such authority.”

Peter Damian (1007–1072) reformist monk

Letter 141:7, To the Chaplains of Duke Godfrey of Tuscany. A.D. 1066. The Fathers of the Church, Medieval Continuation, 2004, Letters 121- 150, Owen J. Blum, Irven Michael Resnick, trs., Catholic University Press; ISBN 081321372X, ISBN 9780813213729, vol. 6, p. 115 http://books.google.com/books?id=cD_swYLRJOUC&pg=PA115&dq=%22but+now+coming+to+your+shameless+assertion+that+ministers+of+the+altar+should+be+allowed+to+marry%22&hl=en&ei=xIPDTI7dEoP-8Ab59snaBg&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1&ved=0CCUQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=%22but%20now%20coming%20to%20your%20shameless%20assertion%20that%20ministers%20of%20the%20altar%20should%20be%20allowed%20to%20marry%22&f=false

“A novel is what you dream in your night sleep. A novel is not waking thoughts although it is written and thought with waking thoughts. But really a novel goes as dreams go in sleeping at night and some dreams are like anything and some dreams are like something and some dreams change and some dreams are quiet and some dreams are not. And some dreams are just what any one would do only a little different always just a little different and that is what a novel is.”

Gertrude Stein (1874–1946) American art collector and experimental writer of novels, poetry and plays

"The Superstitions of Fred Anneday, Annday, Anday; a Novel of Real Life" (1935)
How Writing Is Written: Previously Uncollected Writings, vol.II (1974)

Dreams, Sleep, Change, Night

“The cinema may have a specific beauty of its own, but it does not permit that constant re-reading, that meditative brooding, those turning-back to passages heavily charged with meaning, which form the special pleasure of the novel-reader.”

André Maurois (1885–1967) French writer

The Art of Writing

Pleasure, Beauty, Reading

“Foolish people laugh at those readers a century ago who wept over the novels of Dickens. Is it a sign of superior intellect to read anything and everything unmoved, in a grey, unfeeling Limbo?”

Robertson Davies book A Voice from the Attic

A Voice from the Attic (1960)

People, Reading

“What are novels? What is the secret of the charm of every romance that ever was written? The first thing in a good novel is to place the persons together in circumstances which naturally call out the high feelings and thoughts of the character, which afford food for sympathy between them on these points — romantic events they are called. The second is that the heroine has generally no family ties (almost invariably no mother), or, if she has, these do not interfere with her entire independence.
These two things constitute the main charm of reading novels.”

Florence Nightingale (1820–1910) English social reformer and statistician, and the founder of modern nursing

Cassandra (1860)

Secret, Family, Food, Feeling

“If the masses are not thrown a few novels, they may react by throwing up a few barricades.”

Terry Eagleton (1943) British writer, academic and educator

Source: 1980s, Literary Theory: An Introduction (1983), Chapter 1, p. 21

“From the moment he switches on an early-morning news broadcast until he falls asleep at night over a novel or a magazine, he is, like all other people living in modern civilized conditions, swimming in words. Newspaper editors, politicians, salesmen, disc jockeys, columnists, luncheon club speakers, and clergymen; colleagues at work, friends, relatives, wife and children; market reports, direct-mail advertising, books, and billboards -- all are assailing him with words all day long. […] ”

S. I. Hayakawa book Language in Thought and Action

Source: Language in Thought and Action (1949), The Niagara of Words, p. 15

Children, People, Books, Night

“Yes, the novel is about concrete living relationships, a man's love for a woman, a woman's betrayal of that love. But it is also about wealth, its great attraction as well as its destructive power, the carelessness that comes with it, and, yes, it is about the American dream, a dream of power and wealth, the beguiling light of Daisy's house and the port of entry to America. It is also about loss, about the perishability of dreams once they are transformed into hard reality. It is the longing, its immateriality, that makes the dream pure.”

Azar Nafisi book Reading Lolita in Tehran

Reading Lolita in Tehran (2003)

Love, Dreams, Reality, Light

“It is because these characters depend to such a high degree on their own sense of integrity that for them, victory has nothing to do with happiness. It has more to do with a settling within oneself, a movement inward that makes them whole. Their reward is not happiness — a word that is central in Austen's novels but is seldom used in James's universe. What James's characters gain is self-respect.”

Azar Nafisi book Reading Lolita in Tehran

On Henry James and his novels
Reading Lolita in Tehran (2003)

Happiness, Sense, Universe, Victory

“I asked the panel to list the companies that would certainly be around in the future — and those that wouldn't be. … There was some disagreement about Oracle. Microsoft and Oracle said that Oracle would survive; Apache said it wouldn't. I also asked which companies would be dead. The panel agreed that it would be Apple, Sun and Novell.”

Rob Enderle (1954) American financial analyst

The Future of Transparent Computing: A Comdex Wrap-Up http://technewsworld.com/story/32239.html in Tech News World (24 November 2003)

Sun, Future, Dead

“It must essentially remain a novel of adolescence written by a retarded adolescent.”

John Fowles book The Magus

Introduction (1977 edition)
The Magus (1965)

“Yet what representative trio do not make a mad trio? Blake, Mrs. Aphra Behn, Zeno - not a typical but a representative threesome… Things do not go in simple pairs. Poetry is not a case of Shakespeare and Marlowe, Shelley and Keats, Wordsworth and Coleridge, Bridges and Masefield, Emily Dickinson and T. S. Eliot. Poetry is some awkward trio - like Caedmon, Oliver Goldsmith, Edna St. Vincent Millay. So with the novel.”

Laura Riding Jackson (1901–1991) poet, critic, novelist, essayist and short story writer

Description of Life (Targ Editions, 1980)

Madness

“The artistic triumph of American Jewry lay, he thought, not in the novels of the 1950s but in the movies of the 1930s, those gargantuan, crass contraptions whereby Jewish brains projected Gentile stars upon a Gentile nation and out of their own immigrant joy gave a formless land dreams and even a kind of conscience.”

John Updike (1932–2009) American novelist, poet, short story writer, art critic, and literary critic

Bech, A Book (1970)

Dreams, Star, Joy

“People die. That’s true in novels, and it’s true in life. Dying is one of the very few things we all do. To deny or ignore the omnipresent reality of death seems to me a disservice to human beings. That said, acknowledging in my novels that death exists does not make me a murderer any more than acknowledging that cancer can be treated makes me an oncologist.”

John Green (1977) American author and vlogger

Hey, some people on tumblr are wondering if writers feel upset or get a thrill when they kill their characters. Care to enlighten us?, John Green's tumblr, Tumblr, January 1, 2013, July 15, 2014 http://fishingboatproceeds.tumblr.com/post/39363824562/hey-some-people-on-tumblr-are-wondering-if-writers,

Life, Death, People, Reality

“Rainer [protagonist in the novel], who is reading The Outsider by Camus, says he would like to put the hostility of the world behind him. Once your hope for something better is taken from you, then at last you have the present all in your hand. Then you yourself are reality. Others are extras. When Rainer contemplated san evening he says that evening is melancholy ceasefire where all life has come to and end.”

Elfriede Jelinek book Wonderful, Wonderful Times

53
Wonderful, Wonderful Times (1990)

Life, Hostility, World, Hope

“If we could sniff or swallow something that would, for five or six hours each day, abolish our solitude as individuals, atone us with our fellows in a glowing exaltation of affection and make life in all its aspects seem not only worth living, but divinely beautiful and significant, and if this heavenly, world-transfiguring drug were of such a kind that we could wake up next morning with a clear head and an undamaged constitution-then, it seems to me, all our problems (and not merely the one small problem of discovering a novel pleasure) would be wholly solved and earth would become paradise.”

Aldous Huxley (1894–1963) English writer

Wanted, A New Pleasure
Music at Night and Other Essays (1931)

Life, Pleasure, World, Beauty

“The graphic portrayal of quantitative information has deep roots. These roots reach into histories of thematic cartography, statistical graphics, and data visualization, which are intertwined with each other. They also connect with the rise of statistical thinking up through the 19th century, and developments in technology into the 20th century. From above ground, we can see the current fruit; we must look below to see its pedigree and germination. There certainly have been many new things in the world of visualization; but unless you know its history, everything might seem novel.”

Michael Friendly (1945) American psychologist

Michael Friendly. " Milestones in the history of thematic cartography, statistical graphics, and data visualization http://www.math.yorku.ca/SCS/Gallery/milestone/milestone.pdf, at math.yorku.ca, 2008.

World, History, Thinking

“What I love about fiction is the way this form of expression allows an author to wrestle an idea to the ground, as opposed to the bumper-sticker dialectics that pass for political and philosophical discourse in most sectors of our culture. In the age of mass communication, we need the quiet, contemplative and often ambiguous medium of the novel more than ever.”

James K. Morrow (1947) (1947-) science fiction author

Source: The Philosopher's Apprentice (2008), P. S. (p. 13)

Love, Age, Way, Communication

“Repeated reflection and inquiry have led me to the somewhat novel opinion, that value depends entirely upon utility.”

William Stanley Jevons The Theory of Political Economy

Source: The Theory of Political Economy (1871), Chapter I, Introduction, p. 37.

Dependency

“My first published novel was written for teenagers, and there were rules laid down by the publisher: no sex, no smoking, no swearing. I blew up entire solar systems, I consigned billions of people to horrible death; they didn't seem to mind that at all. But no hanky-panky.”

Ben Bova (1932) American science fiction and science writer

As quoted in "Men on Mars, Women on Venus" by Jay McDonald at Bookpage (June 1999) http://www.bookpage.com/9906bp/ben_bova.html

Death, People, Sex

“So then how have irony, irreverence, and rebellion come to be not liberating but enfeebling in the culture today’s avant-garde tried to write about? One clue’s to be found in the fact that irony is still around, bigger than ever after 30 long years as the dominant mode of hip expression. It’s not a rhetorical mode that wears well. As [Lewis] Hyde… puts it, "Irony has only emergency use. Carried over time, it is the voice of the trapped who have come to enjoy the cage." This is because irony, entertaining as it is, serves an almost exclusively negative function. It’s critical and destructive, a ground-clearing. Surely this is the way our postmodern fathers saw it. But irony’s singularly unuseful when it comes to constructing anything to replace the hypocrisies it debunks. This is why Hyde seems right about persistent irony being tiresome. It is unmeaty. Even gifted ironists work best in sound bites. I find gifted ironists sort of wickedly funny to listen to at parties, but I always walk away feeling like I’ve had several radical surgical procedures. And as for actually driving cross-country with a gifted ironist, or sitting through a 300-page novel full of nothing by trendy sardonic exhaustion, one ends up feeling not only empty but somehow… oppressed.”

David Foster Wallace (1962–2008) American fiction writer and essayist

E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction
Essays

Way, Feeling, Time, Country

“Perhaps the greatest novel of the century.”

Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa (1896–1957) Sicilian writer and prince

Source: Criticism, L. P. Hartley on The Leopard, quoted in Robin Healey Twentieth-Century Italian Literature in English Translation (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1998) p. 146.

“Why Baroque? Because it is set in the Baroque, and it IS baroque. Why Cycle? Because I am trying to avoid the T-word ("trilogy"). In my mind this work is something like 7 or 8 connected novels. These have been lumped together into three volumes because it is more convenient from a publishing standpoint, but they could just as well have been put all together in a single immense volume or separated into 7 or 8 separate volumes. So to slap the word "trilogy" on it would be to saddle it with a designation that is essentially bogus. Having said that, I know everyone's going to call it a trilogy anyway.”

Neal Stephenson (1959) American science fiction writer

Baroque Cycle entry in now-defunct MetaWeb

“But, listen, let's review the rules. Here's how it works: the president makes decisions. He's the Decider. The press secretary announces those decisions, and you people of the press type those decisions down. Make, announce, type. Just put 'em through a spell check and go home. Get to know your family again. Make love to your wife. Write that novel you got kicking around in your head. You know, the one about the intrepid Washington reporter with the courage to stand up to the administration. You know — fiction.”

Stephen Colbert (1964) American political satirist, writer, comedian, television host, and actor

White House Correspondents' Association Dinner (2006)

Love, People, Making love, Family

“To prevent the starving peasants from fleeing to the towns an internal passport system was introduced and unauthorized change of residence was made punishable with imprisonment. Peasants were not allowed passports at all, and were therefore tied to the soil as in the worst days of feudal serfdom: this state of things was not altered until the 1970s. The concentration camps filled with new hordes of prisoners sentenced to hard labour. The object of destroying the peasants’ independence and herding them into collective farms was to create a population of slaves, the benefit of whose labour would accrue to industry. The immediate effect was to reduce Soviet agriculture to a state of decline from which it has not yet recovered, despite innumerable measures of reorganization and reform. At the time of Stalin’ s death, almost a quarter of a century after mass collectivization was initiated, the output of grain per head of population was still below the 1913 level; yet throughout this period, despite misery and starvation, large quantities of farm produce were exported all over the world for the sake of Soviet industry. The terror and oppression of those years cannot be expressed merely by the figures for loss of human life, enormous as these are; perhaps the most vivid picture of what collectivization meant is in Vasily Grossman’ s posthumous novel Forever Flowing.”

Leszek Kolakowski (1927–2009) Philosopher, historian of ideas

pg. 39
Main Currents Of Marxism (1978), Three Volume edition, Volume III: The Breakdown

Life, Death, World, Change

“Light in tone, the novel [Murphy] is Beckett’s response to the therapeutic orthodoxy that the patient should learn to engage with the larger world on the world’s terms.”

J.M. Coetzee (1940) South African writer

“The Making of Samuel Beckett,” New York Review of Books, vol. LVI, no. 7 (April 30, 2009), p. 14

World, Light, Learning

“I could never have believed that such kindness existed: to receive my wretched drawings and then thank me into the bargain. And you need not be so scrupulous about my drawings. Just use those you like.... But, I am madly, crazily happy at the thought that your prose [Devismes novel 'Cocotte'], like so many fireworks, will frame my daubs, that you should have offered me a helping hand on the arduous road towards getting known…”

Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec (1864–1901) French painter

Quote from Lautrec's letter, after he received Devismes' letter full of praise for the 23 illustrations he had sent
Source: 1879-1884, T-Lautrec, by Henri Perruchot, p. 61 - in a letter to his friend Etienne Devismes, Summer of 1881

Happiness, Help, Drawing

“In the case of a novel, or any imaginative work, especially if the tone is poetic, my own preference is for ending with a touch of symbolism which shall leave the reader brooding. A fine novel, a well-written story, "proves" nothing. Certain characters have played their parts, life goes on, and the final passage may be allowed to remain with one foot in the air, as is the case with some of Chopin's conclusions. But there is no absolute rule in such matters, and there are epic novelists who like to end on a powerful crescendo, as Ravel does in Bolero, or Dvorak in the New-World Symphony. Composition has features which are common to all the arts, and the author can learn as much about his business in the concert hall as in the library.”

André Maurois (1885–1967) French writer

The Art of Writing

Life, World, Art, Imagination

“The eighteenth-century polymath Thomas Young was the last person to have read all the books published in his lifetime. That means that he would've read all the Shakespeare and all the Greek and Roman classics and all the theology and all the philosophy and all the science. But the same man today, a man who had read all the books published today, would've had to've read all Dan Brown's novels, two volumes of Chris Moyles' autobiography, The World According to Clarkson by Jeremy Clarkson, The World according to Clarkson II by Jeremy Clarkson, The World according to Clarkson III by Jeremy Clarkson… his mind would be awash with bad metaphors and unsustainable, reactionary opinion; one long anecdote about the time that Comedy Dave put a pound coin in the urinal. In short, the man who had read everything published today would be more stupid than a man who had read nothing. That's not a good state of affairs.”

Stewart Lee (1968) English stand-up comedian, writer, director and musician

Series 1 Episode 1: "Toilet Books"

Books, Stupidity, World, Science

“…You'll never find someone calling A Softer World good natured. I don't think we do a completely bleak comic, but good natured just isn't a way you could ever describe it. Or my novels. Not the way I want.”

Joey Comeau (1980) writer

Interview with Ryan North, of Dinosaur Comics.
I Am Other People

World, Way, Nature, Thinking

“Why can't a writer use writing as a painter uses paint? I try to. When I wrote The Tree of Man I felt I couldn't write about simple, illiterate people in a perfectly literate way; but in my present novel the language is more sophisticated. I think perhaps I have clarified my style quite a lot over the years. I find it a great help to hear the language going on around me; not that what I write, the narrative, is idiomatic Australian, but the whole work has a balance and rhythm which is influenced by what is going on around you. When you first write the narrative it might be unconscious, but when you come to work it over you do it more consciously. It gives what I am writing a greater feeling of reality.”

Patrick White (1912–1990) English-born Australian writer

In The Making (1970)

People, Way, Feeling, Thinking

“From what can "ought" be derived. The most compelling answer is this: ethics must be somehow based on an appreciation of human nature — on a sense of what a human being is or might be, and on what a human being might want to have or want to be. If that is naturalism, then naturalism is no fallacy. No one could seriously deny that ethics is responsive to such facts about human nature. We may just disagree about where to look for the most compelling facts about human nature -n novels, in religious texts, in psychological experiments, in biological or anthropological investigations. The fallacy is not naturalism but, rather, any simple-minded attempt to rush from facts to values. In other words, the fallacy is greedy reductionism of values to facts, rather than reductionism considered more circumspectly, as the attempt to unify our world-view so that out ethical principles don't clash irrationally with the way the world is.”

Daniel Dennett book Darwin's Dangerous Idea

Darwin's Dangerous Idea (1995)

World, Way, Nature, Sense

“To paraphrase Truman Capote, finishing a novel is like taking a child out behind the house and shooting it. To which I would hasten to add, that makes critics a bit like stranger who come along later to piss on the corpse.”

Caitlín R. Kiernan (1964) writer

Trilobite: The Writing of Threshold (2003)

Housing

“I wish more English teachers helped their students engage the classics at the level of raw delight, instead of putting them on the scent of symbols. A novel is not a cryptogram.”

James K. Morrow (1947) (1947-) science fiction author

Source: The Philosopher's Apprentice (2008), P. S. (p. 15)

Teachers, Help

“That wild Irish novel (Blackcock's Feather, Maurice Walsh), a wonderful Elizabethan cloak and dagger story, has started me spinning again, those same old threads; the link between begetting and killing, i. e. that sex and death must both be phenomena of fallen Creation…Another odd parallel; the very men who haven't the courage to beget children, to accept fatherhood, are likely to be pacifists on principle, and opponents of the death penalty. What was it that old Afghan, Mahbud Ali, said to Kim: "When I was fifteen I had shot my man and begot my man!".. as representative of God and Christ glorified, consecrated to him, he [the priest] is absolved from these characteristics of fallen humanity, dispensed, raised above them - neither for ascetic reasons, nor on human grounds, but simply because these are the symbols of the Adamite order.”

Ida Friederike Görres (1901–1971) Austrian writer and noble

Broken Lights p. 41-42 Diaries 1951.

Death, Men, God, Children

“One of the century’s most famous intellectual pronouncements comes at the beginning of The Myth of Sisyphus: “There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide. Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy.” Reading this for the first time I was puzzled and continued to be throughout much of the essay, since despite the work’s persuasive logic and eloquence there was a lot that eluded me, and I always came back to grapple vainly with the initial hypothesis, unable to deal with the premise that anyone should come close to wishing to kill himself in the first place. A later short novel, The Fall, I admired with reservations; the guilt and self-condemnation of the lawyer-narrator, gloomily spinning out his monologue in an Amsterdam bar, seemed a touch clamorous and excessive, but at the time of my reading I was unable to perceive that the lawyer was behaving very much like a man in the throes of clinical depression. Such was my innocence of the very existence of this disease.”

William Styron book Darkness Visible

Source: Darkness Visible (1990), II

Life, Disease, Question, Problem

“The Chinese language lacked terms capable of conveying Buddhist meanings; and not until the fifth century did a handful of scholars become sufficiently at home in both Chinese and Indian learning to be able to translate Buddhist texts into Chinese with a modicum of adequacy. …the novel and initially alien outlook of the Indian faith had somehow to come to terms with the various strands already woven into Chinese culture, ranging… from Confucian and Taoist learning to local sub-literate peasant magic. …while accommodating themselves to older Chinese expectations, Buddhist doctrines and practices simultaneously widened and redefined traditional Chinese sensibilities and aspirations.”

William H. McNeill book The Rise of the West: A History of the Human Community

The Rise of the West: A History of the Human Community (1963)

Faith, Home, Learning

“I am SO tired of this trope. It may indeed be the case that we can’t justify a priori via philosophical lucubrations that we arrive at the truth about nature only by using the methods of science. My answer to that is increasingly becoming, “So bloody what?” The use of science is justified because it works, not because we can justify it philosophically. If we are interested in finding out what causes malaria, no amount of appeal to a deity, philosophical rumination, listening to music, reading novels, or waiting for a revelation will answer that question. We have to use scientific methods, which, of course, is how causes of disease are found.”

Jerry Coyne (1949) American biologist

" A belated reply from Francis Spufford, who defends his faith http://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/2012/10/02/a-belated-reply-from-francis-spufford-who-defends-his-faith/" October 2, 2012

Truth, Disease, Music, Question

“I shall not be satisfied unless I produce something which shall for a few days supersede the last fashionable novel on the tables of young ladies.”

Thomas Babington Macaulay, 1st Baron Macaulay (1800–1859) British historian and Whig politician

Letter to Macvey Napier (5 November 1841)

Fashion

“I found myself going over a particular troublesome scene in the novel, for the one thousand and seventy-third time, in the manner of a lunatic ape in a cage at the zoo, running his fingers back and forth along the iron bars of his home.”

Michael Chabon book Wonder Boys

Wonder Boys (1995)

Home, Time

“When I hear the word "stream" uttered with such a revolting primness, what I think of is urine and not the contemporary novel. And besides, it isn't new, it is far from the dernier cri. Shakespeare used it continually, much too much in my opinion, and there's Tristram Shandy, not to mention the Agamemnon.”

James Joyce (1882–1941) Irish novelist and poet

Said in conversation with Frederic Prokosch and quoted in Prokosch's Voices: A Memoir (1983), "At Sylvia’s." Joyce was replying to Prokosch's statement that Molly Bloom’s monologue in Ulysses was written as a stream of consciousness. "Molly Bloom was a down-to-earth lady" said Joyce. "She would never have indulged in anything so refined as a stream of consciousness."

Thinking

“Up in box five I blinked in surprised amusement. That was a new one! Little Giry should be writing Gothic novels, not prancing around the stage dressed as a water nymph!”

Susan Kay Phantom

Erik (p. 380)
Phantom (1990)

Water, Box

“The problem of the novel is to stay truthful. The short story, if you really are intense and you have an exciting idea, writes itself in a few hours.”

Ray Bradbury (1920–2012) American writer

The Paris Review interview (2010)

Truth, Idea, Problem

“I’m a failed poet. Maybe every novelist wants to write poetry ﬁrst, ﬁnds he can’t, and then tries the short story, which is the most demanding form after poetry. And, failing at that, only then does he take up novel writing.”

William Faulkner (1897–1962) American writer

Paris Review interview (1958)

“I myself was, for nearly six years, in such close touch with the Malay language that it affected my English and still affects my thinking. When I wrote a novel called A Clockwork Orange, no European reader saw that the Malay word for "man" – orang – was contained in the title (Malay students of English invariably write "orang squash"…”

Anthony Burgess (1917–1993) English writer

Non-Fiction, Joysprick: An Introduction to the Language of James Joyce (1973)

Thinking

““They say that they’re a punishment on godly people for allowing sin to walk the earth unanswered—”
“Who is this ‘they’ you’re always referring to?” Stanton glared at Rose, his eyes gleaming with unhidden malice. “Your mongoloid Aunt Kindy? Your drunken Uncle Sal? Or are you talking about the slack-jawed hacks who bang out those dime novels for a bottle of whiskey and the price of a flophouse?”
Rose stared at him, her mouth open in astonishment. But Stanton pressed on, his voice flat and awful.
“Or maybe you’re just using the word ‘they’ as so many pea-brained idiots use it, as a cowardly rhetorical device, an excuse to say the things you really believe without giving anyone the chance to judge you for the narrow-minded, stupid creature you are.””

M. K. Hobson book The Native Star

Source: The Native Star (2010), Chapter 15, “Ososolyeh” (pp. 211-212)

People, Stupidity, Chance

“When facing “scientific” arguments for God like these, ask yourself three questions. First, what’s more likely: that these are puzzles only because we refuse to see God as an answer, or simply because science hasn’t yet provided a naturalistic answer? In other words, is the religious explanation so compelling that we can tell scientists to stop working on the evolution and mechanics of consciousness, or on the origin of life, because there can never be a naturalistic explanation? Given the remarkable ability of science to solve problems once considered intractable, and the number of scientific phenomena that weren’t even known a hundred years ago, it’s probably more judicious to admit ignorance than to tout divinity.
Second, if invoking God seems more appealing than admitting scientific ignorance, ask yourself if religious explanations do anything more than rationalize our ignorance. That is, does the God hypothesis provide independent and novel predictions or clarify things once seen as puzzling—as truly scientific hypotheses do? Or are religious explanations simply stop-gaps that lead nowhere?…Does invoking God to explain the fine-tuning of the universe explain anything else about the universe? If not, then that brand of natural theology isn’t really science, but special pleading.
Finally, even if you attribute scientifically unexplained phenomena to God, ask yourself if the explanation gives evidence for your God—the God who undergirds your religion and your morality. If we do find evidence for, say, a supernatural origin of morality, can it be ascribed to the Christian God, or to Allah, Brahma, or any one god among the thousands worshipped on Earth? I’ve never seen advocates of natural theology address this question.”

Jerry Coyne book Faith vs. Fact: Why Science and Religion are Incompatible

Source: Faith vs. Fact (2015), pp. 156-157

Life, God, Religion, Question

“I always remember how a novel written by John Braine in the 1950s about working-class life in England, which was called Room at the Top, which was translated into Swedish as The Attic!”

John Banville (1945) Irish writer

John Banville: Using words to paint pictures of "magical" Prague (2006)

Life

“Ruskin says that anyone who expects perfection from a work of art knows nothing of works of art. This is an appealing sentence that, so far as I can see, is not true about a few pictures and statues and pieces of music, short stories and short poems. Whether or not you expect perfection from them, you get it; at least, there is nothing in them that you would want changed. But what Ruskin says is true about novels: anyone who expects perfection from even the greatest novel knows nothing of novels.”

Randall Jarrell (1914–1965) poet, critic, novelist, essayist

“An Unread Book”, p. 47
The Third Book of Criticism (1969)

Art, Music, Change, Perfection

“"The contingency is remote." (This is also a Jeeves quote in the PG Wodehouse Novels)”

Jack Vance Dying Earth

Source: Dying Earth (1950-1984), The Eyes of the Overworld (1966), Chapter 1, "The Overworld"

Quotes

“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.”

Hayden White (1928–2018) American historian

"The fictions of factual representation"

Truth, History

“The bourgeois novel is the greatest enemy of truth and honesty that was ever invented. It's a vast, sentimentalizing structure that reassures the reader, and at every point, offers the comfort of secure moral frameworks and recognizable characters. This whole notion was advanced by Mary McCarthy and many others years ago, that the main function of the novel was to carry out a kind of moral criticism of life. But the writer has no business making moral judgments or trying to set himself up as a one-man or one-woman magistrate's court. I think it's far better, as Burroughs did and I've tried to do in my small way, to tell the truth.”

J. G. Ballard (1930–2009) British writer

"J.G. Ballard on William S. Burrough's Naked Truth" by Richard Kadrey in Salon (2 September 1997) http://web.archive.org/web/20000511215816/http://www.salon.com/sept97/wsb2970902.html

Life, Truth, Way, Business

“Flaubert read too many books, and in consequence some of his own books stagger under the weight of his erudition. He said he'd read some preposterous number of books to prepare for the writing of Salammbô, and you can feel them dragging the novel down. It would have been much better if he'd made it all up.”

John Banville (1945) Irish writer

John Banville, The Art of Fiction No. 200 (2009)

Books, Feeling, Reading

“His fiction – radical, satirical, polyvalent, sexually courageous, global – extended the mainstream novel, and led it somewhere else. Still not fully recognized, he was one of Britain's greatest late-twentieth-century writers.”

Angus Wilson (1913–1991) british author

Malcolm Bradbury, in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/50701 Criticism

Courage

“For me [fiction] is a manner of philosophizing … Philosophy may be only a shadow of the reality it tries to grasp, but the novel is altogether more satisfactory. I am almost tempted to say that no philosopher is qualified to do his job unless he is also a novelist … I would certainly exchange any of the works of Whitehead or Wittgenstein for the novels they ought to have written.”

Colin Wilson (1931–2013) author

Source: Voyage To A Beginning (1968), p. 160-1

Reality

“A thousand newspapers vulgarise knowledge, debase aesthetical appreciation, democratise success and make impossible all that was once unusual and noble. The man of letters has become a panderer to the intellectual appetites of a mob or stands aloof in the narrowness of a coterie. There is plenty of brilliance everywhere, but one searches in vain for a firm foundation, the power or the solidity of knowledge. The select seek paradox in order to distinguish themselves from the herd; a perpetual reiteration of some startling novelty can alone please the crowd…. Of all literary forms the novel only has still some genius and even that is perishing of the modern curse of overproduction.”

Sri Aurobindo (1872–1950) Indian nationalist, freedom fighter, philosopher, yogi, guru and poet

March 26, 1910
India's Rebirth

Search, Knowledge, Success

“Strangely enough, there were certain scholars who envied the freedom of obscurity, and who, burdened with certain private sorrows which they dared not tell anyone, or who perhaps wanting only a holiday from the weariness of the sort of art they had themselves created, wrote novels too, under assumed and humble names. And when they did so they put aside pedantry and wrote as simply and naturally as any common novelist.
For the novelist believed that he should not be conscious of techniques. He should write as his material demanded.”

Pearl S. Buck (1892–1973) American writer

The Chinese Novel (1938)

Art, Nature, Freedom, Holiday

“Writing a novel is actually searching for victims. As I write I keep looking for casualties. The stories uncover the casualties.”

John Irving (1942) American novelist and screenwriter

Interview in Writers at Work: The Paris Review Interviews (1988)

“People think because a novel's invented, it isn't true. Exactly the reverse is the case. Because a novel's invented, it is true. Biography and memoirs can never be wholly true, since they can't include every conceivable circumstance of what happened. The novel can do that. The novelist himself lays it down. His decision is binding.”

Anthony Powell A Dance to the Music of Time

Hearing Secret Harmonies (1975), ch. 3.
A Dance to the Music of Time (1951-1975)

People, Thinking, Decision

“The great modern novel of the comic-pathetic illusion of freedom is Confessions of Zeno.”

Italo Svevo (1861–1928) Italian writer

James Wood in London Review of Books, January 3, 2002. http://www.lrb.co.uk/v24/n01/wood02_.html. Criticism

Freedom

“All those words of praise they use for novels – spare, economical. Why should I shell out £17 for economical?”

Howard Jacobson (1942) British author and journalist

Interviewed in the Daily Telegraph, April 2003. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/arts/main.jhtml;$sessionid$FUVRY4DIEVBSTQFIQMFCFF4AVCBQYIV0?xml=/arts/2003/04/27/bojac27.xml&sSheet=/arts/2003/04/27/bomain.html

“A final argument for broad freedom of expression is its effect on the character of individuals in a society. Citizens in a free society must have courage — the courage to hear not only unwelcome political speech but novel and shocking ideas in science and the arts.”

Anthony Lewis book Freedom for the Thought That We Hate

[186, Anthony, Lewis, w:Anthony Lewis, Freedom for the Thought That We Hate; A Biography of the First Amendment, Basic Books, 2007, 0465039170]

Art, Idea, Courage, Freedom

“Nobody ever wrote so well so fast as Jim. One year he wrote, and we published, nine novels. It was an obsession. Back in 1941, his father had been in an asylum in Oklahoma City, begging Jim to get him out. Jim needed money to get him out, so he said to his father, "Give me a month, and I'll raise the money." His father brightened, because Jim never went back on his word. Jim took a bus to New York City and went door to door to the publishing houses, asking for money for a hotel room, a rented typewriter and meals so he could write a novel. Finally, at Modern Age, they took a chance, and in 10 days he wrote a novel. But things being what they are in publishing, it was a month plus one day before Jim got his advance. The same day, a telegram arrived. His father had committed suicide, ripping the excelsior out of his mattress and stuffing it down his throat. When Jim would drink he would sometimes cry and say, "Why couldn't he have waited another day? Didn't he trust me?"”

Arnold Hano (1922) American writer

From "Jim Thompson, 1906 - 1977," in The Los Angeles Times (May 1, 1977), p. X3
Other Topics

Money, Age, Drink, Suicide

“The Book of Boz is neither a novel nor a poem nor a tale. Even less is it a drama or an essay.
It is nothing except the style that inspires it and haunts it, to excess.
No points of reference here.
No beacon.
You sail wherever the wind blows.
Stories are woven, end, are reborn, with the flow, before a storm comes up to carry us further away, to the threshold of a new vision.
For, that is The Book of Boz : a work outside of norms, indefinable, created by a wanderer for other wanderers.”

Julien Friedler (1950) artist, writer

The Book of Boz http://www.spiritofboz.org/en/spirit-of-boz/the-book-of-boz/ The Spirit of Boz

Books

“In the morning when we began straggling out in small parties on our way to the trial, several of us went down in the elevator with three entirely correct old gentlemen looking much alike in their sleekness, pinkness, baldness, glossiness of grooming, such stereotypes as no proletarian novelist of the time would have dared to use as the example of a capitalist monster in his novel. We were pale and tightfaced; our eyelids were swollen; no doubt in spite of hot coffee and cold baths, we looked rumpled, unkempt, disreputable, discredited, vaguely guilty, pretty well frayed out by then. The gentlemen regarded us glossily, then turned to each other. As we descended the many floors in silence, one of them said to the others in a cream-cheese voice, "It is very pleasant to know we may expect things to settle down properly again," and the others nodded with wise, smug, complacent faces.
To this day, I can feel again my violent desire just to slap his whole slick face all over at once, hard, with the flat of my hand, or better, some kind of washing bat or any useful domestic appliance being applied where it would really make an impression — a butter paddle — something he would feel through that smug layer of too-well-fed fat.”

Katherine Anne Porter (1890–1980) American journalist, essayist, short story writer, novelist, and political activist

The Never-Ending Wrong (1977)

Way, Feeling, Coffee, Silence

“The big contemporary novel is a perpetual motion machine that appears to have been embarrassed into velocity. It seems to want to abolish stillness, as if ashamed of silence. Stories and sub-stories sprout on every page, and these novels continually flourish their glamorous congestion.”

James Wood (1965) literary critic

Hysterical realism
The Irresponsible Self (2004)

Silence, Appearance

“Not a single one of our ancient sources indicates that Jesus was married, let alone married to Mary Magdalene. All such claims are part of modern fictional reconstructions of Jesus' life, not rooted in the surviving accounts themselves. The historical approach to our sources may not be as exciting and sensationalist as fictional claims about Jesus (he kept a lover! he had sex! he made babies!), but there's something to be said for knowing what really happened in history, even if it is not as titillating as what happens in novels.”

Bart D. Ehrman (1955) American academic

Source: Truth and Fiction in The Da Vinci Code (2004), Ch. 7: 'Jesus, Mary Magdalene, and Marriage'

Life, Sex, History, Lovers

“…“originality” is everyone’s aim, and novel techniques are as much prized as new scientific discoveries. [T. S. ] Eliot states it with surprising naïveté: “It is exactly as wasteful for a poet to do what has been done already as for a biologist to rediscover Mendel’s discoveries.””

Randall Jarrell (1914–1965) poet, critic, novelist, essayist

of modernism; “The End of the Line”, pp. 79–80
Kipling, Auden & Co: Essays and Reviews 1935-1964 (1980)

“I believe that I have now experienced the lifetime maximum exposure to bottom spanking in fantasy novels.”

James Nicoll (1961) Canadian fiction reviewer

[diu2g2$dc1$1@reader2.panix.com, 2005]
2000s

“I read myths and fairy tales and books about them a great deal now, but I very seldom read novels. I find modern novels bore me. I can read Tolstoy and the Russians, but mostly I read comparative mythology and comparative religion. I need matter to carry with me.”

P. L. Travers (1899–1996) Australian-British novelist, actress and journalist

The Paris Review interview (1982)

Books, Religion, Reading

“So far as supply and demand are concerned, books in general and works of fiction in particular are commodities and subject to the same laws, statutory and traditional, as other articles of manufacture. A toy-dealer would not venture to sell real pistols to little boys as pop-guns, and a gun-maker who should try to sell the latter for army revolvers would get into trouble, even though he were able to prove that the toy was as expensive to manufacture as the real article, or more so, silver-mounted, chiselled, and lying in a Russia-leather case. I am not sure that the law might not support the purchaser in an action for damages if he discovered at a critical moment that his revolver was a plaything. It seems to me that there is a similar case in the matter of novels. A man buys what purports to be a work of fiction, a romance, a novel, a story of adventure, pays his money, takes his book home, prepares to enjoy it at his ease, and discovers that he has paid a dollar for somebody’s views on socialism, religion, or the divorce laws.”

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

The Novel: What It Is (1893)

Money, Books, Religion, Law

“In 1925 Heisenberg made a new attempt, on entirely novel lines, to obtain an explanation of atomic spectra. Working in collaboration with Bohr, he had come to the conclusion that the imperfections of Bohr's theory had been a consequence of assuming too simple a model for the atom. For Bohr had not only assumed that the atom consisted of particles moving through space and time, but also that the particles inside atoms were of the same kind as the electrons outside atoms.”

James Jeans (1877–1946) British mathematician and astronomer

Physics and Philosophy (1942)

Time

“…a novel is a prose narrative of some length that has something wrong with it…”

Randall Jarrell (1914–1965) poet, critic, novelist, essayist

“An Unread Book”, p. 50
The Third Book of Criticism (1969)

“Basler finds my Lincoln the 'phoniest historical novel I have ever had the pleasure of reading.'… Also, 'more than half the book could never have happened as told.' Unfortunately, he doesn't say which half. If I knew, we could then cut it free from the phony half and publish the result as Basler's Vidal's Lincoln.”

Gore Vidal (1925–2012) American writer

"Lincoln and the Priests of Academe"
1990s, United States - Essays 1952-1992 (1992)

Pleasure, Books, Reading

“I think of Ramu. The Ramu I know and the Ramu I'm writing about have become indistinguishable. The same's true of the Bombay I'm recounting from experience and the Bombay I'm assembling through words. This is often how novels begin for me. There's a convergence. I live. Then something prompts me to write. The writing is not about life. It is a form of living. The two happen simultaneously.”

Amit Chaudhuri (1962) contemporary Indian-English novelist

Friend of My Youth (2017)

Life, Thinking

“Online births and deaths in Facebook Nation made me question why people could not live without borders. Birthright citizenship is like being baptized into a religion as an infant. Taking a page from Veronica Roth’s novel Divergent, people should be free to choose where they belong when they grow up.”

Newton Lee American computer scientist

Facebook Nation: Total Information Awareness (2nd Edition), 2014

Death, People, Religion, Birth

“I was trying to solve the problem of this book. (My Life as a Man) When it seemed I never would, I stopped and wrote Our Gang; when I tried again and still couldn't write it, I stopped and wrote the baseball book; then while finishing the baseball book, I stopped to write The Breast. It was as though I were blasting my way through a tunnel to reach the novel I couldn't write. Each of one's books is a blast, clearing the way for what's next.”

Philip Roth (1933–2018) American novelist

Paris Review Interview (1986)

Life, Books, Way, Problem

“Somehow, women’s romance novels are not titled He Stopped When I Said “No”. They are, though, titled Sweet Savage Love, in which the woman rejects the hand of her gentler lover who saves her from the rapist and marries the man who repeatedly and savagely rapes her. It is this “marry the rapist” theme that not only turned Sweet Savage Love into a best-seller but also into one of women’s most enduring romance novels.”

Warren Farrell book The Myth of Male Power

Source: The Myth of Male Power (1993), Part III: Government as substitute husband, p. 315.

Love, Women, Lovers

“The central problem of novel-writing is causality.”

Jorge Luis Borges (1899–1986) Argentine short-story writer, essayist, poet and translator, and a key figure in Spanish language literature

"Narrative Art and Magic" ["El arte narrativo y la magia"]
Discussion (1932)

Problem

“Works that have a certain imperfection to them have an appeal for that you're attracted to Soseki's The Miner. There's something in it that draws you in, more than more fully realized novels like Kokoro or Sanshiro. You discover something about that work that tugs at your heart-or maybe we should say that work discovers you.”

Haruki Murakami book Kafka on the Shore

Source: Kafka on the Shore (2002), Chapter 13, Schubert

Heart, Drawing

“The world is full of signals that we don't perceive. Tiny creatures live in a different world of unfamiliar forces. Many animals of our scale greatly exceed our range of perception for sensations familiar to us. […] What an imperceptive lot we are. Surrounded by so much, so fascinating and so real, that we do not see (hear, smell, touch, taste) in nature, yet so gullible and so seduced by claims for novel power that we mistake the tricks of mediocre magicians for glimpses of a psychic world beyond our ken. The paranormal may be a fantasy; it is certainly a haven for charlatans. But “parahuman” powers of perception lie all about us in birds, bees, and bacteria.”

Stephen Jay Gould book The Panda's Thumb

"Natural Attraction: Bacteria, the Birds, and the Bees", p. 313
The Panda's Thumb (1980)

Lie, World, Nature, Bird

“To walk home alone at night is a disaster, in novels. Some girls confuse the state of being in love and being lonely, and think they are the former when in fact they are the latter; in love with everyone and no one, just because they are without a man.”

Halldór Laxness book The Atom Station

Atómstöðin (The Atom Station) (1948)

Love, Home, Girl, Thinking

“Bear in mind that the novel—no matter how intimate, psychological, or subjective—is always a historical projection of its own time.”

Samuel R. Delany book Nova

Source: Nova (1968), Chapter 4 (p. 116)

Time

“The progress of science requires more than new data; it needs novel frameworks and contexts. And where do these fundamentally new views of the world arise? They are not simply discovered by pure observation; they require new modes of thought. And where can we find them, if old modes do not even include the right metaphors? The nature of true genius must lie in the elusive capacity to construct these new modes from apparent darkness. The basic chanciness and unpredictability of science must also reside in the inherent difficulty of such a task.”

Stephen Jay Gould book The Flamingo's Smile

"False Premise, Good Science", p. 138
The Flamingo's Smile (1985)

Lie, World, Nature, Science

“The establishment of formal standards for proofs about programs […] and the proposal that the semantics of a programming language may be defined independently of all processors for that language, by establishing standards of rigor for proofs about programs in the language, appears to be novel.”

Robert Floyd (1936–2001) American computer scientist

Source: Assigning Meanings to Programs http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~weimer/2007-615/reading/FloydMeaning.pdf (1967), pp. 19–20.

Appearance

“Have the courage to analyze great emotions to create characters who shall be lofty and true. The whole art of the analytical novel lies there.”

Paul Bourget (1852–1935) French writer

Pierre Fauchery, as quoted by the character "Jules Labarthe"
The Age for Love

Art, Courage

“Been reading Hardy's Return of the Native. Astonishing how moral standards have shifted over the past hundred years:shifted isn't the word - a landslide… Today the problems of these nineteenth-century novels strike us as exaggerated, as bathos, even comical - much ado about nothing. But for these people it really was a struggle with the gods, very real, menacing, dangerous gods.”

Ida Friederike Görres (1901–1971) Austrian writer and noble

Broken Lights Diaries 1955-57.

God, People, Problem, Reading

“In a revolution, as in a novel, the most difficult part to invent is the end.”

Alexis De Tocqueville (1805–1859) French political thinker and historian

Recollections of Alexis de Tocqueville, p. 71 http://books.google.com/books?id=3gtoAAAAMAAJ&pg=PA71&dq=%22most+difficult+part+to+invent+is+the+end%22. 1850s and later

Parting

“During the thirty years I have spent abroad I have felt I was more privileged than my Western colleagues, whether writers or teachers of literature, for events both recent and long past took in my mind a sharply delineated, precise form. Western audiences confronted with poems or novels written in Poland, Czechoslovakia or Hungary, or with films produced there, possibly intuit a similarly sharpened consciousness, in a constant struggle against limitations imposed by censorship. Memory thus is our force, it protects us against a speech entwining upon itself like the ivy when it does not find a support on a tree or a wall.”

Czeslaw Milosz (1911–2004) Polish, poet, diplomat, prosaist, writer, and translator

Nobel lecture (8 December 1980)

Literature, Support, Tree, Teachers

“A good novel is one that shows the complexity of individuals, and creates enough space for all these characters to have a voice; in this way a novel is called democratic — not that it advocates democracy but that by nature it is so.”

Azar Nafisi book Reading Lolita in Tehran

Reading Lolita in Tehran (2003)

Way, Democracy, Nature

“What about [my] books? How do I feel about them?
I enjoyed writing all of them. But I think that if I could only choose a few, which, for example, might escape World War Three, I would choose, first, Eye in the Sky. Then The Man in the High Castle. Martian Time-Slip (published by Ballantine). Dr. Bloodmoney (a recent Ace novel). Then The Zap Gun and The Penultimate Truth, both of which I wrote at the same time. And finally another Ace book, The Simulacra.
But this list leaves out the most vital of them all: The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch. I am afraid of that book; it deals with absolute evil, and I wrote it during a great crisis in my religious beliefs. I decided to write a novel dealing with absolute evil as personified in the form of a "human." When the galleys came from Doubleday I couldn't correct them because I could not bear to read the text, and this is still true.
Two other books should perhaps be on this list, both very new Doubleday novels: Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? and another as yet untitled Ubik]. Do Androids has sold very well and has been eyed intently by a film company who has in fact purchased an option on it. My wife thinks it's a good book. I like it for one thing: It deals with a society in which animals are adored and rare, and a man who owns a real sheep is Somebody… and feels for that sheep a vast bond of love and empathy. Willis, my tomcat, strides silently over the pages of that book, being important as he is, with his long golden twitching tail. Make them understand, he says to me, that animals are really that important right now. He says this, and then eats up all the food we had been warming for our baby. Some cats are far too pushy. The next thing he'll want to do is write SF novels. I hope he does. None of them will sell.”

Philip K. Dick (1928–1982) American author

"Self Portrait" (1968), reprinted in The Shifting Realities of Philip K. Dick (1995), ed. Lawrence Sutin

Love, War, Truth, Books

“Who, according to JK Rowling, the author of the Harry Potter novels, was Harry Potter's first girlfriend? Who is the first person he kisses? That's right, Cho Chang, who is a Chinese overseas student at Hogwarts school," he said, to laughs and scattered applause. "Ladies and gents I rest my case."”

Boris Johnson (1964) British politician, historian and journalist

2010s, 2013

School, Kiss, Change, Personality

“I have made up my mind to like no novels really, but Miss Edgeworth's, yours and my own.”

Maria Edgeworth (1768–1849) Irish writer

Jane Austen, letter to her niece, Anna Lefroy, 1814; cited from Valerie Grosvenor Myer Jane Austen, Obstinate Heart (New York: Arcade, 1997) p. 196.
Criticism

“Devereux Forester's being ruined by his vanity is extremely good, but I wish you would not let him plunge into a "vortex of dissipation." I do not object to the thing, but I cannot bear the expression; it is such thorough novel slang, and so old that I daresay Adam met with it in the first novel he opened.”

Jane Austen (1775–1817) English novelist

Letter to niece Anna (1814-09-28) regarding a character in Anna's novel [Letters of Jane Austen -- Brabourne Edition]
Letters

“Like all obsessions, Ballard's novel is occasionally boring and frequently ridiculous. The invariance of its intensity is not something the reviewer can easily suggest. Ballard is quite unlike anyone else; indeed, he seems to address a different - a disused - part of the reader's brain. You finish the book with some bafflement and irritation. But this is only half the experience. You then sit around waiting for the novel to come and haunt you. And it does.”

Martin Amis (1949) Welsh novelist

Review of The Day of Creation by J. G. Ballard, p. 109
The War Against Cliché: Essays and Reviews 1971-2000 (2001)

Books, Waiting, Parting

Quotes about novel page 6

Quotes about novel
page 6