Books Quote by Reif Larsen

A novel quite possibly won't be good and, even more possibly, will have not-good parts, but at least it won't shape-shift on you; at…

— Ben Dolnick

If you're going to have a complicated story you must work to a map; otherwise you'll never make a map of it afterwards.

— J. R. R. Tolkien

“But when the self—not a fictional character—is the landscape of the story, we can’t afford to be blind to our own themes and the…

— Dani Shapiro

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

To read a novel is a difficult and complex art.

— Virginia Woolf

Somehow, you can achieve a directness in the novel that you can't get anywhere else.

— Chad Harbach

A novel is challenging, because you have more story than you need and you have to select and narrow.

— Peter Hedges

Ironically, writing a novel is not a way to sort out your confusion.

— Curtis Sittenfeld

I believe a novel should be as complicated and involved as you're capable of making it.

— John Irving

This novel is fiction, except for the parts that aren't.

— Michael Crichton

A novel is a book with a lot of pages.

— Kathy Acker

What we know about writing the novel is the novel.

— Eudora Welty