Walker Percy Quotes

NOVEL, n. A short story padded.

I describe my works as books, but my publishers in Spain, in the United States, and elsewhere insist on calling them novels.

To me there's no difference between a book of stories and a novel - they're just slightly different shapes.

Every story we remember is a novel. Novels make things more universal.

This novel is fiction, except for the parts that aren't.

I would be rejected if I submitted any of my novels as romance novels.

I write literary, not commercial, fiction - or so I've been told by my publishers who are proud I write literary fiction but secretly wish I wrote commercial.

Most books aren't pure nonfiction or fiction.

In course of time my first novel appeared. It was a love story.

I can't stand the short story form, which, after all, is a magazine form.

I always assumed I could never make a living out of literary fiction, and I was right. When I did try, it took four years before being published.

I'm sold as a literary writer in Holland; I'm sold as crime fiction in England. I think of it as just literature.

A novel is achieved with hard work, the short story with inspiration.

Literature is always something - it is either story or poetry, ideally both. That is, you always know what it is and even if the interpretation is not available, the experience of language is.

The vast majority of fiction is written to markets and to this damnable business we have nowadays of categorizing everything.

We are not quite novels. We are not quite short stories. In the end, we are collected works

Nonfiction, to me, feels like an argument, whereas a novel is like a series of questions.

I've never liked the publishing world's determination to pigeonhole every writer into a genre.

Can we call the essay its own genre if it's so promiscuously versatile? Can we call any genre a 'genre' if, when we read it from different angles and under different shades of light, the differences between it and something else start becoming indistinguishable?

It's really hard to be a story writer - no matter how much acclaim you get - and not write a novel.

My medium is prose, not the novel.

I'm a novelist at heart. My sole intention is to write the best novel possible. I don't think about the film potential at all.

I was born in the era of the novel. I've written many, as well as collections of poetry, and essays for mouthing off. I've written to inches, word-counts, page-counts, even the sonnet and the screenplay (which I call a plot poem). I write narrative. That's it. I just want to tell it.

The novel does not simply recount experience, it adds to experience.

Human beings have their great chance in the novel.