“Marcus de Obregón is appealing and, yes, instructive, but is not entirely successful because the author often forgot he was writing a novel, not his memoirs.”
Source: The Novel: An Alternative History, 1600-1800
“Sorel's novels deserve to be revived, but Polexander can be left in its watery grave.”
Source: The Novel: An Alternative History, 1600-1800
“As you write your novel, you gradually start thinking like some of your characters in it. And at times the writer may lose himself completely in some character.”
“And if the novel [The Education of Cyrus] remains dull by modern standards, we have to remind ourselves Xenophon didn't set out to write a "novel" — there was no such thing yet in his culture — but was feeling his way to a new form somewhere between factual history and fanciful epic. Our hat is always off to innovators.”
Source: The Novel: An Alternative History: Beginnings to 1600
“So we'll leave him [Plato] to the philosophers and not try to make a novelist of him against his will; he excluded innovative artists from his ideal republic, so we'll exclude him from our republic of fiction.”
Source: The Novel: An Alternative History: Beginnings to 1600
“Blessings be upon you, Heliodorus, for bringing the novel into full intellectual maturity and for showing what this newfangled genre could be in the hands of a master.”
Source: The Novel: An Alternative History: Beginnings to 1600
“I suppose someone could trawl through the 383 volumes of Migne's Patrologiae Cursus Completus and extract some book-length hagiographies that qualify as novels — there had to be a few protonovelists who adopted hagiography as the only game in town, as painters of religious subjects learned to do — but that someone isn't me.”
Source: The Novel: An Alternative History: Beginnings to 1600
“Readers have been so conditioned that they feel embarrassed to admit that they find it hard to stomach the work of a literary giant for fear it would betray their plebian taste. The fact is that a few read, and fewer enjoy, the novels of those who sit on the literary pedestal. We have allowed ourselves to be persuaded that a book with a story can't be quite in the same class as a book that leaves us to interpret what is unsaid.”
Source: A Carrot is a Carrot
“You can't have everything, I've often noticed it.”
Source: Molloy
“They ain’t rich folk, that I know. Rich folk don’t try so hard.”