Another Quote by Jane Smiley

I think that novels are one of the best means that we have to communicate both with the past and with the future.

— Emily Barton

Each book, intuitively sensed and, in the case of fiction, intuitively worked out, stands on what has gone before, and grows out of it.

— V. S. Naipaul

I read many wonderful novels, though I now find the idea of literary fiction obsolete.

— Simon Sebag Montefiore

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

Novels help us to resist the temptation to think of the past as deficient.

— Ian Mcewan

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

— Jonathan Lethem

A novel is a way to rethink and rewrite and re-envision the past, and also a way to speak to people who haven't been…

— Emily Barton

Historical novels, in particular, allow us to relive the past without the neatness of history, and with all the complexity of the present.

— Laila Lalami

The historical novel gives us perspective on our modern lives and helps us connect with the story, which we are continuing ourselves.

— Mary Pope Osborne

“And yet rereading a book can often be a more significant, dramatic, and, yes, new experience than encountering an unfamiliar work.”

— Alan Jacobs

I do not share the pessimism of the age about the novel. They are one of our greatest spiritual, aesthetic and intellectual inventions. As…

— Richard Flanagan

This is what I have discovered - and it has been a gift in itself - that books live over and over again in…

— Rachel Joyce