I have met with women whom I really think would liketo be married to a poem, and to be given away by a novel.

-Keats,John
  Letter to Fanny Brawne, 8  Jul.

You mustn't look inmy novel for the old stable ego of the character.

-Lawrence, D(avid) H(erbert)
  Letter to Edward Garnett, 5  Jun.

But thisnovel wasnot a trumpet for Women's Liberation. It described many female emotions of aggression, hostility, resentment. It put them into print. Apparently what many women were thinking, feeling, experiencing came as a great surprise.

-Lessing, Doris May ne¤  e Tayler
The Golden Notebook, preface to new edition.

He understood†Walt Whitman, who laid end to end words never seen in each other's company before outside of a dictionary, and Herman Melville who split the atom of the traditional novel in the effort to make whaling a universal metaphor.

-Lodge, David John
  Changing Places, ch.5.

When a novel comes, it's a grace. Something in the cosmos has forgiven you long enough so that you can start.

-Mailer, Norman Kingsley
  In The Guardian, 5 Oct.

   The greatest invention since the novel.

-Mead, Margaret
  Of television. Comment, 31 Dec.

Fora Jewish Puritanofthemiddleclass,thenovel isserious, the novel is work, the novel is conscientious applicationö why,thenovelispractically theretailbusinessalloveragain.

-Nemerov, Howard
  Journal of the Fictive Life,'Reflexions of the Novelist Felix Ledger'.

There was a time when the average reader read a novel simply for the moral he could get out of it, and however na|«ve that may have been, it was a good deal less na|«ve than some of the limited objectives he has now.

-O'Connor, (Mary) Flannery
  'Some  Aspects of the Grotesque in Southern Fiction'. Paper read at  Wesleyan College, Fall.

The novel is practicallya Protestant form of art; it is the product of the free mind, of the autonomous individual.

-Orwell, George pseudonym of  Eric Arthur Blair
  Inside the Whale,'Inside The Whale'.

People think that because a novel's invented, it isn't true. Exactly the reverse is the case.

-Powell, Anthony Dymoke
  Hearing Secret Harmonies, ch.3.

Writing a novel you haveto be quiteawarethat what you are writing is not all true. Such a character did not cross the road at such a time; this is not true.

-Spark, Dame Muriel Sarah ne¤  e  Camberg
InJohnTusa On Creativity: Interviews Explaining the Process (2003).

I believe I have liberated the novel in many ways, showing how anything whatsoever can be narrated, including sheerdamn cheek.Ithink Ihave openeddoors and windows in the mind, and challenged fearsöespecially the most inhibiting fears about what a novel should be.

-Spark, Dame Muriel Sarah ne¤  e  Camberg
  In the Sunday Herald, 22 Feb.

   Think of the heroism of Johnson, think of that superb indifference to mortal limitation that set him upon his dictionary, and carried him through triumphantly until the end! Who, if he were wisely considerate of things at large, would ever embark upon any work much more considerable than a halfpenny post-card? Who would project a serial novel, afterThackeray and Dickens had each fallen in mid-course? Who would find heart enough to begin to live, if he dallied with the consideration of death?

-Stevenson, Robert Louis
Virginibus Puerisque,'AesTriplex'.

   It is admitted that a novel can hardly be made interesting or successful without love† It is necessary because the passion is one which interests or has interested all. Everyone feels it, has felt it, or expects to feel it.

-Trollope, Anthony
  Autobiography, ch.12.

We cannot have heroes to dine with us. There are none. And were those heroes to be had, we should not like them†the persons whom you cannot care for in a novel, because they are so bad, are the very same that you so dearly love in your life, becausetheyare so good.

-Trollope, Anthony
  Of Frank Greystock.The Eustace Diamonds, ch.35.

A novel is a static thing that one moves through; a play is a dynamic thing that moves past one.

-Tynan, Kenneth
Curtains.

Lady Peabury was in the morning room reading a novel; 892 early training gave a guilty spice to this recreation, for she had been brought up to believe that to read a novel before luncheon was one of the gravest sins it was possible for a gentlewoman to commit.

-Waugh, Evelyn Arthur StJohn
  'An Englishman's Home'.

Above all I was determined to prove that the Australian novel is not necessarily the dreary, dun-coloured offspring of journalistic realism.

-White, Patrick Victor Martindale
  Essay on his literary career, in Australian Letters,'The Prodigal Son', vol.1, no.3, Apr.

The impulse to write a novel comes from a momentary unified vision of life.

-Wilson, SirAngus FrankJohnstone
  TheWild Garden.