Anxiety Quote by Anatole Broyard

The novel is like a melancholy form. It's about some kind of disillusionment with the way things are versus the idea of how they…

— Elif Batuman

The novel avoids the sublime and seeks out the interesting.

— Mason Cooley

“I read novels to indulge in a concentrated and directed inner activity that parallels -- and thereby tunes up, accentuates -- my own inner…

— Sven Birkerts

Literature is achieved anxiety.

— Harold Bloom

“But if this biography suggests a varied and sympathetic apprehension of the world, it was with a far darker palette that Céline came to…

— Will Self

“The other night we talked about literature's elimination of the unessential, so that we are given a concentrated "dose" of life. I said, almost…

— Anaïs Nin

“Its mental discipline, however, is by far more fruitful, and keeps one's mind in equipoise, making one neither passionate nor dispassionate, neither sentimental nor…

— Kaiten Nukariya

“From the beginning I've searched out those writers unafraid to stir up the emotions, who entrust me with their darkest passions, their most indestructible…

— Pat Conroy

“Fiction cannot move so much, but that the attention may be easily transferred; and though it must be allowed that pleasing melancholy be sometimes…

— Samuel Johnson

“Writing is a solitary venture. Making use of a soundless void in the vortex of time the author enters the realm of restoration, an…

— Kilroy J. Oldster

“A novel is the final common pathway of a writer's experiences, fears, wishes, thoughts, feelings & fantasies. All is distilled in a novel.”

— Mark Rubinstein

“ I once took pleasure some place in seeing men, through piety, take a vow of ignorance, as of chastity, poverty, penitence. It is…

— Michel Eyquem de Montaigne