Jane Smiley Novel Quotations

When a novel has two hundred thousand words, then it is possible for the reader to experience two hundred thousand delights, and to turn back to the first page of the book and experience them all over again, perhaps more intensely.

When a novel has 200,000 words, then it is possible for the reader to experience 200,000 delights, and to turn back to the first page of the book and experience them all over again, perhaps more intensely.

he aspired to produce something simultaneously less vulgar and less formless than the novels of the great Victorians, and ... he wished his work to elevate the novel to the status of art.

Writing this book was incredibly fun because I soaked in the bathtub, laid around eating chocolate in bed, cooked dinner for my family and read novels the whole time.

Not every novel that wants to be a tragedy gets to be one.

Trollope wrote so many novels and other works that they tend to crowd each other out.

An urban novelist never minds a little decay.

The desire to write a novel is the single required prerequisite for writing a novel.

Writing novels is an essentially amateur activity.

A novelist is on the cusp between someone who knows everything and someone who knows nothing.

Novelists never have to footnote.

Novelists of a conservative or more purely aesthetic bent hold up better on the surface, but their novels go in and out of fashion according to relevance or irrelevance.

The main thing about the novel that is totally fascinating: It's not possessed by the writer; it's possessed by the reader.

My reading had a wonderful effect and it worked in several ways on different levels. It inspired in me the idea that it was OK to go on as a novelist in good faith and that there could be room in my consciousness and the national consciousness about thoughts other than terrorism and 9/11.

accepted his idea that the audience for a quality novel might not be large enough to support the author by means of commerce; this idea is a truism today, but it was new, even revolutionary, for Virginia Woolf, James Joyce and many of their contemporaries.