Books Quote by Diane Johnson

But novels are never about what they are about; that is, there is always deeper, or more general, significance. The author may not be…

— Diane Johnson

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

There's a perception that novels can't usually allow for your kind of absolute attention to detail.

— Zadie Smith

I think novels just really show us the deepest parts of people's hearts, and you cannot walk away anymore and say, "I don't know."

— Edwidge Danticat

These are all novels, all about people that never existed, the people that read them it makes them unhappy with their own lives. Makes…

— Ray Bradbury

What we know about writing the novel is the novel.

— Eudora Welty

Novels attempt to render human experience; that's really all they are. They are meant to convey empathy for the character.

— Sue Monk Kidd

Great novels are maps of complication, leading nowhere in particular, taking stances only provisionally and obliquely, happy to be tangled and to lack as…

— Michelle Dean

One of the things that novels have tended not to concentrate on over the centuries is the fact that people read books.

— Jonathan Lethem

The things that the novel does not say are necessarily more numerous than those it does say and only a special halo around what…

— Italo Calvino

The novelist helps us to see things we might not notice otherwise.

— Madeleine L'Engle

“The novel is a hybrid genre and a large part of its charm arises from the alluvial nature of its materials. There is nothing…

— Enrique Vila-Matas