Character Quote by Edgar Allan Poe

The only justification for writing a novel is that it should be wonderful. Adequate is inadequate.

— Janet Burroway

“T[he rules of writing] require that the episodes in a tale shall be necessary parts of the tale, and shall help to develop it.”

— Mark Twain

“The central character is an incomplete package of yearning that takes the length of the novel to complete. Completion, though, is not to be…

— Patricia Hickman

“The serious writer has always taken the flaw in human nature for his starting point, usually the flaw in an otherwise admirable character. Drama…

— Flannery O'Connor

Aside from that reservation, a fictive tale even has the advantage of manifesting symbolic necessity more purely to the extent that we may believe…

— Jacques Lacan

In some ways, a novel isn't as structurally rigorous as a screenplay or a TV show, which have finite real estate. In a novel,…

— Howard Gordon

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

“The importance of a story doesn't merely lie in the development of its plot and the characters involved in it, but in its exploration…

— Gulzar

“Different narrative forms naturally lend themselves to different aspects of existence. The novel is ideal for presenting the inner lives of its characters, the…

— Todd Alcott

The quality of this novel is the way the plot is treated and not the plot itself.

— Anonymous

“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

The novel is a prose narrative of some length that has something wrong with it.

— Randall Jarrell