Books Quote by Dawn Foster

Novel-writing is a highly skilled and laborious trade. One does not just sit behind a screen jotting down other people's conversation. One has for…

— Evelyn Waugh

“Perhaps a book becomes a classic in proportion to how broadly its characters can be scavenged, how many readers find within it something they…

— Janna Malamud Smith

Novels are so interior and idiosyncratic and such a solitary process.

— Megan Abbott

“Eventually, we come to love certain novels because we have expended so much imaginative labor on them. This is why we hang on to…

— Orhan Pamuk

A great novelist must open the reader's heart, allow the reader to remember the vastness and glory -- and shame and shabbiness -- of…

— Carolyn See

Writing a novel is one of those modern rites of passage, I think, that lead us from an innocent world of contentment, drunkenness, and…

— J. G. Ballard

“To write an excellent novel, make the outcome of the story matter to the reader through the evolving relationships between well-designed characters.”

— Martin Sandforth

In the novels I most admire, there is this sense that, within the confines of the world, the possibilities are always opening in new…

— Laura van den Berg

People used to expect literary novels to deepen the experience of living; now they are happy with any sustained display of writerly cleverness.

— Anonymous

One must be just a little crazy to write a great novel. One must be capable of allowing the darkest, most ancient and shrewd…

— John Gardner

The triumph of writing fiction is that by doing so, writers can build a more ideal world in themselves.

— Lauren Groff

To me, novels are a trip of discovery, and you discover things that you don't know and you assume that many of your readers…

— Tom Wolfe