Cricket, like the novel, isgreat when it presents men in the round, when it shows the salty quality of human nature.

-Aristotle
  Quoted in Colin  Jarman The Guinness Dictionary of Sports Quotations (1990).

Oh! it is onlya novel!†only some work in which the most thorough knowledge of human nature, the happiest delineationof itsvarieties,theliveliesteffusions of wit and humour are conveyed to the world in the best chosen language.

-Austen,Jane
  Northanger Abbey, ch.5.

La passion est toute l'humanite¤  . Sans elle, la religion, l'histoire, le roman, l'art seraient inutiles. Passion is all of humanity.Without it, religion, history, the novel and art would be useless.

-Balzac, Honore¤   de
  La Come¤  die humaine, foreword.

A novel is balanced between a few true impressions and the multitude of false ones that make up most of what we call life.

-Bellow, Saul
  Nobel prize lecture, Stockholm,12 Dec.

The modern novel has been many things, and functioned at many levels. It would keep D.H. Lawrence poor, and make Jilly Cooper and Jeffrey Archer rich.

-Bradbury, Malcolm Stanley
  The Modern British Novel, preface.

The post-war period has not been marked bya great aesthetic debate about the novel comparable to that of the earlier half of the century, in part because the role of the writer and critic divided, the writer going off to the marketplace and the critic to the university (which eventually turned out to be much the same thing).

-Bradbury, Malcolm Stanley
  The Modern British Novel, preface.

My scrofulous French novel On grey paper with blunt type!

-Browning, Robert
  Dramatic Lyrics,'Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister'.

I found myself growing increasingly irritated with the notion of a British novel, which was really an irritation with the word British, a grey, unsatisfactory, bad- weather kind of word, a piece of linguistic compromise.

-Buford, Bill (William Holmes)
  Editorial, Granta, no.43.

   A novel is never anything but a philosophy put into images.

-Camus, Albert
Recalled on his death, 4  Jan1960.

If I were a writer, how I would enjoy being told the novel is dead.How liberating to work in the margins, outside a central perception.Youaretheghoul of literature.Lovely.

-DeLillo, Don
  Owen Brademas. The Names, ch.4.

   We agreed that the novel is absolutely the only vehicle for the thought of our day.

-Ford, Ford Madox originally Ford Hermann Hueffer
  Joseph Conrad,  a Personal Remembrance, pt.3.

Yesöoh dear yesöthe novel tells a story.

-Forster, E(dward) M(organ)
  Aspects of the Novel, ch.2.

Just as the camera draws a stake through the heart of serious portraiture, television has killed the novel of social reportage.

-Franzen,Jonathan
  How to Be Alone. English writer, best known for her historical biographies.

He¤  las! Les femmes n'ont lu que le roman de l'homme et jamais son histoire. Alas, women have read only the novel of mankind, not the history.

-Gautier,The¤  ophile
  Mademoiselle de Maupin.

Writing a novel does not become easier with practice.

-Greene, (Henry) Graham
  Ways of Escape, ch.5.

A novel is an impression, not an argument.

-Hardy,Thomas
  Tess of the D'Urbervilles, preface to 5th edn.

When a writer calls his work a Romance, it need hardly be observed that he wishes to claim a certain latitude, both as to its fashion and material, which he would not have felt himself entitled to assume had he professed to be writing a Novel.

-Hawthorne, Nathaniel
The House of the Seven Gables, preface.

Landscape is to American painting what sex and psychoanalysis are to the American novel.

-Hughes, Robert Studley Forrest
  In Time, 30 Dec.

The only obligation to which in advance we may hold a novel, without incurring the accusation of being arbitrary, is that it be interesting.

-James, Henry
  'The  Art of Fiction', collected in Partial Portraits (1888).

I thought that writing a detective story would be a wonderful apprenticeship because, whatever people tell you, a crime novel is not easy to write well. As I continued with my craft I became increasingly fascinated by the form and realized that you can use the formula to say something true about men and women and the society in which they live.

-Baroness
  'Series Detectives', collected in Brown and Munro (eds) Writers Writing (1993).