Books Quote by Vissarion Belinsky

“Twofold misjudgement. - The misfortune suffered by clear-minded and easily understood writers is that they are taken for shallow and thus little effort is…

— Friedrich Nietzsche

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

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 seems that the fiction writer has a revolting attachment to the poor, for even when he writes about the rich, he is more…

— Flannery O'Connor

The novel is just fine: It's novelists who aren't doing so well.

— Russell Smith

If the work is poor, the public taste will soon do it justice. And the author, reaping neither glory nor fortune, will learn by…

— Jacques-Louis David

“To the Richmond Leader in 1966 when the school board banned her novel: “Surely it is plain to the simplest intelligence that ‘To Kill…

— Harper Lee

“...no mind ever grew fat on a diet of novels. The pleasure which they occasionally offer is far too heavily paid for: they undermine…

— Elias Canetti

The novel is the first art form that is an honest-to-god commodity. That's what makes it different from both high art and folk art.

— Leslie Fiedler

“Really good literature is seldom appreciated in its own day. The best authors die poor, the bad ones make money - it's always been…

— Walter Moers

For both writer and reader, the novel is a lonely, physically inactive affair. Only the imagination races.

— Mary McCarthy

“Every stylistic excess and moral defect which critics conspired to ignore in the author's first books, LANARK and UNLIKELY STORIES, MOSTLY, is to be…

— Alasdair Gray