Book Quote by Anthony Holden

Holding this book in your hand, sinking back in your soft armchair, you will say to yourself: perhaps it will amuse me. And after…

— Honore de Balzac

“What could he do but accept the disturbing extent to which memory was fictional and hope that the fiction lay at the service of…

— Edward St. Aubyn

The fiction writer has to engage in a continual examination of conscience. He has to be aware of the freak in himself.

— Flannery O'Connor

“Any writer or journalist who wants to retain his integrity finds himself thwarted by the general drift of society rather than by active persecution.…

— George Orwell

“...they'll say, 'He never recovered from that breakdown and this was the result. It had to be the breakdown--not even he was that dreadful…

— Philip Roth

“What was the point of having a situation worthy of fiction if the protagonist didn't behave as he would have done in a book?”

— Julian Barnes

“Now he only had an abstract interest in what was surrounding him, as though none of this was happening to him, but he was…

— Dmitry Glukhovsky

“A man is like a novel: until the very last page you don't know how it will end. Otherwise it wouldn't even be worth…

— Yevgeny Zamyatin

“I think the climax of the book will be the execution of poor old Edgar Derby,” I said. “The irony is so great. A…

— Kurt Vonnegut

“The reader! You, dogged, uninsultable, print-oriented bastard, it's you I'm addressing, who else, from inside this monstrous fiction. You've read me this far, then?…

— John Barth

What about the hero of The House on the Strand? What did it mean when he dropped the telephone at the end of the…

— Daphne du Maurier

“He started to do that, started to inform me of everything; the inconsequential, the meaningful; conversations that ended in a cul-de-sac of unanswerable rhetoric.…

— Sarah Winman