Behavior Quote by Flannery O'Connor

Readers of novels often fall into the bad habit of being overly exacting about the characters' moral flaws. They apply to these fictional beings…

— Edmund White

The novel is just fine: It's novelists who aren't doing so well.

— Russell Smith

It's with bad sentiments that one makes good novels.

— Aldous Huxley

I read novels for entertainment rather than for edification, so I tend not to read the sort of novels that are said to illuminate…

— Richard Dawkins

It is with noble sentiments that bad literature gets written.

— Andre Gide

I don't believe novels should carry an obvious message. I don't want to write characters you can immediately say are good or bad; as…

— Christopher Koch

“Good characters in fiction are the very devil. Not only because most authors have too little material to make them of, but because we…

— C.S. Lewis

There is a natural disposition with us to judge an author's personal character by the character of his works. We find it difficult to…

— Edwin Percy Whipple

A bad book is as much of a labor to write as a good one; it come as sincerely from the author's soul

— Aldous Huxley

“Part of the writer's problem may be thee wrong kind of appreciation: hen he does work he knows to be less than he's capable…

— John Gardner

Good novels are not written, they are rewritten. Great novels are diamonds mined from layered rewrites.

— Piers Paul Read

I will not adopt that ungenerous and impolitic custom so common with novel writers, of degrading by their contemptuous censure the very performances, to…

— Jane Austen