Novel Characteristics Quotes

The End of the Affair is almost like a play.

A novel is a book with a lot of pages.

The novel is a formidable mass, and it is so amorphous - no mountain in it to climb, no Parnassus or Helicon, not even a Pisgah. It is most distinctly one of the moister areas of literature - irrigated by a hundred rills and occasionally degenerating into a swamp. I do not wonder that the poets despise it, though they sometimes find themselves in it by accident. And I am not surprised at the annoyance of the historians when by accident it finds itself among them.

A novel is not a play. A novel takes one reader at a time into its confidence. It can be shockingly personal. Private, even.

For me, a memoir is supposed to be understood as a representation of your life, whereas a novel is self-consciously symbolic.

A lot of times with novels, you can get a really deep, engaging story, but there's not a lot happening, frankly. Those books tend to be super-literary and dense, and they require a lot of commitment, and that's not necessarily a bad thing, but if you want fast-moving action and gore and plot and excitement, you can get shorted on that.

I would say that it is a trait by which Americans, searching for things which are different or new, seem to recognize the gift that people may have that cause people do to things.

The greater the novel, the more it is apt to embody the special, non-replicable properties of the written medium.