Character Quote by Mona Simpson

I have never known a novel that was good enough to be good in spite of its being adapted to the author's political views.

— Edith Wharton

I don't believe there can be a poetic novel without political consciousness. I have a strong political conscience.

— Marguerite Young

I would never, ever use a novel to do thinly disguised political information dissemination. For me, all these experiences, they sat in me, and…

— Arundhati Roy

I cannot stand Tolstoy, and reading him was the most boring literary duty I ever had to perform, his philosophy and his sense of…

— Ayn Rand

Tolstoy was the most gifted writer who ever lived. It's like he stuck a pen in his heart and it didn't even go through…

— Mel Brooks

I don't like novels that tie everything up in a plot-y way. I always think that's not really true of life, particularly of people…

— Sarah Hall

In general, I think every novel is a political novel, in that every novel is an argument about how the world works, who has…

— Micah Perks

How many really great writers are there who are totally non-political? You can hear the French Revolution in the poetry of [Percy Bysshe] Shelly…

— Adam Hochschild

It makes me nuts, the idea that if you put a political struggle at the heart of your book, then it has to be…

— Ruth Ozeki

I have the power to write these books where I invent characters that I really like, and it gets to come out the way…

— Ruth Glick

This is not Tolstoy. I don't want to know what critics and professors think of what I'm writing. It might hurt my feelings.

— Lisa Kleypas

I feel much more comfortable in politics than I did in book writing. Book writing is so hard. Politics felt easy compared to that.

— Zephyr Teachout