Novel

"The stupidity of people comes from having an answer for everything. The wisdom of the novel comes from having a question for everything....The novelist teaches the reader to comprehend the world as a question. There is wisdom and tolerance in that attitude. In a world built on sacrosanct certainties the novel is dead...In any case, it seems to me that all over the world people nowadays prefer to judge rather than ask so that the voice of the novel can hardly be heard over the noisy foolishness of human certainties"

"[on an unnamed book] This is not a novel to be tossed aside lightly. It should be thrown with great force."

"The novel is dead. As dead as alchemy."

"Every novel is like this, desperation, a frustrated attempt to save something of the past. Except that it still has not been established whether it is the novel that prevents man from forgetting himself or the impossibility of forgetfulness that makes him write novels."

"I am no novel reader – I seldom look into novels - Do not imagine that I often read novels - It is only very well for a novel."

"Life must not be a novel that is given to us, but one that is made by us."

"No one says a novel has to be one thing. It can be anything it wants to be, a vaudeville show, the six o’clock news, the mumblings of wild men saddled by demons."

"Life is painful and disappointing. It is useless, therefore, to write new realistic novels. We generally know where we stand in relation to reality and don’t care to know any more.”"

"The main question to a novel is -- did it amuse? Were you surprised at dinner coming so soon? Did you mistake eleven for ten? Were you too late to dress? And did you sit up beyond the usual hour? If a novel produces these effects, it is good; if it does not -- story, language, love, scandal itself cannot save it. It is only meant to please; and it must do that or it does nothing."

"In every first novel the hero is the author as Christ or Faust"

"Since 1900 there must have been published far more than twenty thousand novels. No man could read them all; if he did, a new spate of fiction would foam and swirl round him while he was at the task, and he would never catch up. Selection, voluntary and involuntary, there is bound to be. And it is bound to involve injustice."

"The novel belongs to the category of natural poetry - the allegory to that of the artificial."