Answers Quote by Michelle Dean

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

Good novels are produced by people who voluntarily isolate themselves and go deep, and report from the depths on what they find.

— Jonathan Franzen

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

— Piers Paul Read

All the best novels are about one thing: how we go on. The characters must survive the fallout of their own cowardice, folly, denial…

— Julia Glass

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

One might say that the novel is the genre that most predisposes one to a profound insight into the tremendous life around us, instead…

— Mikhail Sholokhov

Many novelists take well-defined, precise characters, whose stories are sometimes of mediocre interest, and place them in an important historical context, which remains secondary…

— Raymond Queneau

Every serious novel is, beyond its immediate thematic preoccupations, a discussion of the craft, a conquest of the form, a conflict with its difficulties…

— Ralph Ellison

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

Novels are so interior and idiosyncratic and such a solitary process.

— Megan Abbott

“Writing novels allows the novelist to spend much of his time in a fictional world, which is really the only or at least the…

— Javier Marías

“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