The Novel
/The novel sprang from the letter, the diary, the report of a journey; it felt itself alive in the form of every record of private life. Subjectivity was soon everybody’s subject.
WILLIAM GASS
A good novel is worth more than the best scientific study.
SAUL BELLOW
No one says a novel has to be one thing. It can be anything it wants to be, a vaudeville show, the six o'clock news, the mumblings of wild men saddled by demons.
ISHMAEL REED
A great novel is worth one thousand films.
OSCAR HIJUELOS
A novel is like a bow, and the violin that produces the sound is the reader's soul.
STENDHAL
Expansion, that is the idea the novelist must cling to, not completion, not rounding off, but opening out.
E. M. FORSTER
It seems to me that popular novels in our age might serve the same function as stained-glass windows did in the Middle Ages.
ANDREW GREELEY
Art, though, is never the voice of a country; it is an even more precious thing, the voice of the individual, doing its best to speak, not comfort of any sort, but truth. And the art that speaks it most unmistakably, most directly, most variously, most fully, is fiction; in particular, the novel.
EUDORA WELTY
