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Quotes about fiction
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Although our productions have afforded more extensive and unaffected pleasure than those of any other literary corporation in the world, no species of composition has been so much decried. And what are you reading, Miss -- -? Oh! it is only a novel! replies the young lady; while she lays down her book with affected indifference, or momentary shame. It is only Cecilia, or Camilla, or Belinda ; or, in short, only some work in which the greatest powers of the mind are displayed, in which the most thorough knowledge of human nature, the happiest delineation of its varieties, the liveliest effusions of wit and humor, are conveyed to the world in the best chosen language. (Attenborough Richard)
Novels are longer than life. (Attenborough Richard)
Fiction is not imagination. It is what anticipates imagination by giving it the form of reality. This is quite opposite to our own natural tendency which is to anticipate reality by imagining it, or to flee from it by idealizing it. That is why we shall never inhabit true fiction; we are condemned to the imaginary and nostalgia for the future. (Attenborough Richard)
The traditional novel form continues to enlarge our experience in those very areas where the wide-angle lens and the Cinema screen tend to narrow it. (Attenborough Richard)
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Writing novels preserves you in a state of innocence -- a lot passes you by -- simply because your attention is otherwise diverted. (Attenborough Richard)
Novelists are perhaps the last people in the world to be entrusted with opinions. The nature of a novel is that it has no opinions, only the dialectic of contrary views, some of which, all of which, may be untenable and even silly. A novelist should not be too intelligent either, although he may be permitted to be an intellectual. (Attenborough Richard)
Novels as dull as dishwater, with the grease of random sentiments floating on top. (Attenborough Richard)
If I were a writer, how I would enjoy being told the novel is dead. How liberating to work in the margins, outside a central perception. You are the ghoul of literature. Lovely. (Attenborough Richard)
I at least have so much to do in unraveling certain human lots, and seeing how they were woven and interwoven, that all the light I can command must be concentrated on this particular web, and not dispersed over that tempting range of relevancies called the universe. (Attenborough Richard)
The final test for a novel will be our affection for it, as it is the test of our friends, and of anything else which we cannot define. (Attenborough Richard)
Writing a novel is not merely going on a shopping expedition across the border to an unreal land: it is hours and years spent in the factories, the streets, the cathedrals of the imagination. (Attenborough Richard)
By its very nature, the novel indicates that we are becoming. There is no final solution. There is no last word. (Attenborough Richard)
Novelists do not write as birds sing, by the push of nature. It is part of the job that there should be much routine and some daily stuff on the level of carpentry. (Attenborough Richard)
You know that fiction, prose rather, is possibly the roughest trade of all in writing. You do not have the reference, the old important reference. You have the sheet of blank paper, the pencil, and the obligation to invent truer than things can be true. You have to take what is not palpable and make it completely palpable and also have it seem normal and so that it can become a part of experience of the person who reads it. (Attenborough Richard)
When writing a novel a writer should create living people; people not characters. A character is a caricature. (Attenborough Richard)
Writing a novel is actually searching for victims. As I write I keep looking for casualties. The stories uncover the casualties. (Attenborough Richard)
The only reason for the existence of a novel is that it does attempt to represent life. (Attenborough Richard)
The time-honored bread-sauce of the happy ending. (Attenborough Richard)
Fiction is the truth inside the lie. (Attenborough Richard)
All great novels, all true novels, are bisexual. (Attenborough Richard)
No matter how ephemeral it is, a novel is something, while despair is nothing. (Attenborough Richard)
Would you not like to try all sorts of lives -- one is so very small -- but that is the satisfaction of writing -- one can impersonate so many people. (Attenborough Richard)
For if the proper study of mankind is man, it is evidently more sensible to occupy yourself with the coherent, substantial and significant creatures of fiction than with the irrational and shadowy figures of real life. (Attenborough Richard)
For a Jewish Puritan of the middle class, the novel is serious, the novel is work, the novel is conscientious application -- why, the novel is practically the retail business all over again. (Attenborough Richard)
The first sentence of every novel should be: Trust me, this will take time but there is order here, very faint, very human. Meander if you want to get to town. (Attenborough Richard)
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