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
Great, big, serious novels always get awards. If it's a battle between a great, big, serious novel and a funny novel, the funny novel is doomed. Neil Gaiman
My fellow students there were very smart, but the really novel thing was that they actually seemed to put a lot of effort into their school work. By the end of my first semester there, I began to get into that habit as well. Eric Allin Cornell
By asking a novel question that you don't know the answer to, you discover whether you can formulate a way of finding the answer, and you stretch your own mind, and very often you learn something new. Walter Gilbert
The ear tends to be lazy, craves the familiar and is shocked by the unexpected; the eye, on the other hand, tends to be impatient, craves the novel and is bored by repetition. W. H. Auden
Short-story writing requires an exquisite sense of balance. Novelists, frankly, can get away with more. A novel can have a dull spot or two, because the reader has made a different commitment. Lynn Abbey
A screenplay is not a finished product; a novel is. A screenplay is a blueprint for something - for a building that will most likely never be built. Nicholas Meyer
Restoration I did because I really loved e novel and I like Michael Hoffman, who directed it, but it wasn't a really challenging part for me. I'm not critical of the film: I just don't think I gave a very interesting performance. David Thewlis
All of my problems are rather complicated - I need an entire novel to deal with them, not a short story or a movie. It's like a personal therapy. Manuel Puig
