If a novel’s salient aim is virtue, I want to throw it against the wall.

An author’s extraliterary utterance (blunt information), prenovel or postnovel, may infiltrate journalism; it cannot touch the novel itself. Fiction does not invent out of a vacuum, but it invents; and what it invents is, first,...

Get thee to the novel! – the novel, that word-woven submarine, piloted by intimation and intuition, that will dive you to the deeps of the heart’s maelstrom.

What does the novel know? It has no practical or educational aim; yet it knows what ordinary knowledge cannot seize. The novel’s intricate tangle of character-and-incident alights on the senses with a hundred cobwebby knowings...

All the great novels are about obsession and people who are obsessed.

What great literature does best is to show us those moments which make life worth living.

The novel was born with the Modern Era, which made man, to quote Heidegger, the “only real subject,” the ground for everything. It is largely through the novel that man as an individual was established...