Denmark Quote by J. M. Coetzee

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

All my friends who wanted to write had got nowhere trying to write the great European novel. So I deliberately steered clear of that…

— Jo Nesbo

“Most novels, if they are successful at all, are original in the sense that they report the existence of an area of society, a…

— Doris Lessing

Thank God for novelists. Thank God there are people willing to write everything down. Otherwise, so much would be forgotten.

— Kurt Vonnegut

Great novels are always a little more intelligent than their authors.

— Milan Kundera

Authors are far closer to the truths enfolded in mystery than ordinary people, because of that very audacity of imagination which irritates their plodding…

— Gertrude Atherton

“I would be quite satisfied if my novels (especially the ones I set in the past) did no more than teach my readers that…

— Chinua Achebe

Few of us write great novels; all of us live them.

— Mignon McLaughlin

Novelists are no more moral or certain than anybody else; we are ideologically adrift, and if we are any good then our writing will…

— Andrew O'Hagan

The novel is a highly corrupt medium, after all - in the end the vast majority of them simply aren't that great, and are…

— Lev Grossman

It was easy to believe, between lessons on Shakespeare and Dickens and Austen, that all of the great stories had already been written by…

— Ally Carter

And then, as if written by the hand of a bad novelist, an incredible thing happened.

— Jonathan Stroud