Absolutes Quote by Zadie Smith

Writers have to be careful not to confuse personal attention with the attention that's going towards the book.

— Anonymous

The fact is that in this day and age I don't think any novelist can assume that a book will get attention.

— Curtis Sittenfeld

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

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

The novelist helps us to see things we might not notice otherwise.

— Madeleine L'Engle

Novels are . . . an unsurpassed form to understand people.

— Henning Mankell

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

To read a novel is a difficult and complex art. You must be capable not only of great fineness of perception, but of great…

— Virginia Woolf

In some ways, a novel isn't as structurally rigorous as a screenplay or a TV show, which have finite real estate. In a novel,…

— Howard Gordon

Novels often thin themselves out to a watery hue - some even start that way - and at times seem to only ride along…

— David Means

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

— Jonathan Lethem

Writing novels preserves you in a state of innocence - a lot passes you by - simply because your attention is otherwise diverted.

— Anita Brookner