“Early on, for better or worse, I chose whose child I wanted to be: the child of the novel. Almost everything else was subjugated to this ruling passion, reading stories. As a consequence, I can barely add a column of double digits, I have not the slightest idea of how a plane flies, I can’t draw any better than a five-year-old.”— Zadie Smith
“My brother Keith begged to go with us as usual. He’ll turn thirteen in a few days – August 14 – and the thought of waiting two more years until he’s 15 must seem impossible to him. I understand. Waiting is terrible. Waiting to be older is worse than other kinds of waiting because there’s nothing you can do to make it happen faster.”— Octavia E. Butler
“The essentials,” I answered, “are to learn to shape God with forethought, care, and work; to educate and benefit their community, their families, and themselves; and to contribute to the fulfillment of the Destiny.”— Octavia E. Butler
“We read novels because we want to see the world through other experiences, other beings, other eyes, other cultures.”— Orhan Pamuk
“Don’t try to resist the effect that a work of imaginative literature has on you.”— Mortimer J. Adler
“It’s very silly,” she said, “but I go on with it in spite of myself. I’m afraid I’m too easily pleased; no novel is so silly I can’t read it.”— Henry James
“And even with the book closed, the voices do not stop–there are echoes and reverberations that seem to leap off the pages and mischievously leave the novel tingling in our ears.”— Azar Nafisi
“I think the reason novels are regarded to have so much more ‘information’ than films is that they outsource the scenic design and cinematography to the reader… This, for me, is a powerful argument for the value and potency of literature specifically. Movies don’t demand as much from the player. Most people know this; at the end of the day you can be too beat to read but not yet too beat to watch television or listen to music.”— Brian Christian
“Novels are forged in passion, demand fidelity and commitment, often drive you to boredom or rage, sleep with you at night. They are the long haul. They are marriage. Stories, on the other hand, you can lose yourself in for a few weeks and then wrap up, or grow tired of and abandon and (maybe) return to later. They can cuddle you sweetly, or make you get on your knees and beg.”— David Leavitt
“Novels for me are how I find out what’s going on in my own head. And so that’s a really useful and indeed critical thing to do when you do as many of these other things as I do.”— Cory Doctorow
“In writing a novel, when in doubt, have two guys come through the door with guns.”— Raymond Chandler
“A short story is a love affair, a novel is a marriage. A short story is a photograph; a novel is a film.”— Lorrie Moore
“If you only write when you’re inspired you may be a fairly decent poet, but you’ll never be a novelist because you’re going to have to make your word count today and those words aren’t going to wait for you whether you’re inspired or not.You have to write when you’re not inspired. And you have to write the scenes that don’t inspire you. And the weird thing is that six months later, a year later, you’ll look back at them and you can’t remember which scenes you wrote when you were inspired and which scenes you just wrote because they had to be written next.The process of writing can be magical. …Mostly it’s a process of putting one word after another.”— Neil Gaiman
“A novel is never anything but a philosophy expressed in images. And in a good novel the philosophy has disappeared into the images.”— Albert Camus