The two most common charges against the older fiction, that it pleased wickedly and that it taught nothing, had broken down before the discovery, except in illiberal sects, that the novel is fitted both for honest use and for pleasure. Carl Clinton Van Doren
The way this whole novel thing came together was, I sold them one bill of goods and then didn't communicate very well. I am like Captain Run-on Sentence. Ahmet Zappa
Then about 1951 I began writing again, painfully, a novel I called in the beginning A Life Sentence on Earth, but which developed into The Tree of Man. Patrick White
Today, there are more opportunities for writers in terms of access to larger success, but it's more difficult to publish a literary novel in the lower ranges. In other words, you almost have to hit a home run. You can hit a triple, maybe, but nobody's interested in a single. James Lee Burke
Turning one's novel into a movie script is rather like making a series of sketches for a painting that has long ago been finished and framed. Vladimir Nabokov
What I couldn't help noticing was that I learned more about the novel in a morning by trying to write a page of one than I'd learned in seven years or so of trying to write criticism. Philip Pullman
What makes literature interesting is that it does not survive its translation. The characters in a novel are made out of the sentences. That's what their substance is. Jonathan Miller
What's the challenge in writing a novel that few people will read? I'm more than happy writing what I do and have no plans to change that. Nicholas Sparks
When I look back over my novels what I find is that when I think I'm finished with a theme, I'm generally not. And usually themes will recur from novel to novel in odd, new guises. Richard Russo
