"I believe that all novels, ... deal with character, and that it is to express character " not to preach doctrines, sing songs, or celebrate the glories of the British Empire, that the form of the novel, so clumsy, verbose, and undramatic, so rich, elastic, and alive, has been evolved ... The great novelists have brought us to see whatever they wish us to see through some character. Otherwise they would not be novelists, but poet, historians, or pamphleteers."

Literature, Novel, Character, Truth

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"I believe that all novels, ... deal with character, and that it is to express character " not to preach doctrines, sing songs, or celebrate the glories of the British Empire, that the form of the novel, so clumsy, verbose, and undramatic, so rich, elastic, and alive, has been evolved ... The great novelists have brought us to see whatever they wish us to see through some character. Otherwise they would not be novelists, but poet, historians, or pamphleteers."

Exlpore more Literature quotes

"A man reading the Dickens novel wished that it might never end. Men read a Dickens story six times because they knew it so well."

Gilbert K. Chesterton, English Writer

Literature, Desire, Nostalgia, Memory

"Prose consists less and less of words chosen for the sake of their meaning, and more and more of phrases tacked together like the sections of a prefabricated hen-house."

George Orwell, British Author

Literature, Writing, Prose, Creativity, Art

"Every healthy person at some period must feed on fiction as well as fact; because fact is a thing which the world gives to him, whereas fiction is a thing which he gives to the world."

Gilbert K. Chesterton, English Writer

Literature, Fiction, Fact, World, Imagination

"The role of a story was, in the broadest terms, to transpose a single problem into another form. ... It was like a piece of paper bearing the indecipherable text of a magic spell."

Haruki Murakami, Japanese Writer

Literature, Storytelling, Problem, Solution, Imagination

"Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman."

Virginia Woolf, British Author

Literature, Poetry, Women, History, Creativity

"And she never could remember and ever since that day what Lucy means by a good story is a story which reminds her of the forgotten story in the Magician's Book."

C. S. Lewis, British Author

Literature, Storytelling, Memory, Meaning, Imagination

"It is usually unbearably painful to read a book by an author who knows way less than you do, unless the book is a novel."

Mokokoma Mokhonoana, South African Philosopher

Literature, Pain, Learning, Ignorance, Reading

"The atmosphere of orthodoxy is always damaging to prose, and above all it is completely ruinous to the novel, the most anarchical of all forms of literature."

George Orwell, British Author

Literature, Prose

"If I have not read a book before, it is, for all intents and purposes, new to me whether it was printed yesterday or three hundred years ago."

William Hazlitt, English Critic

Literature, Years, Yesterday

"Good characters in fiction are the very devil. Not only because most authors have too little material to make them of, but because we as readers have a strong subconscious wish to find them incredible."

C. S. Lewis, British Author

Literature, Fiction, Character, Realism, Subconscious

Explore more quotes by Ursula K. Le Guin

"If you want your writing to be taken seriously, don't marry and have kids, and above all, don't die. But if you have to die, commit suicide. They approve of that."

Kids, Suicide, Want, Writing

"My imagination makes me human and makes me a fool; it gives me all the world and exiles me from it."

Imagination, Fool, World

"It had never occurred to me before that music and thinking are so much alike. In fact you could say music is another way of thinking, or maybe thinking is another kind of music."

Music, Fact, Thinking

"The unread story is not a story; it is little black marks on wood pulp. The reader, reading it, makes it live: a live thing, a story."

Reading, Wood

"Heaven and earthbegin in the unnamed:name's the motherof the ten thousand things."

Spiritual, Creation, Origin, Philosophy

"Love does not just sit there, like a stone; it had to be made, like bread, remade all the time, made new."

Love, Time

"The only thing that makes life possible is permanent, intolerable uncertainty; not knowing what comes next."

Life, Uncertainty

"The truth is that as a man's real power grows and his knowledge widens, ever the way he can follow grows narrower: until at last he chooses nothing but does only and wholly what he must do."

Power, Knowledge, Choice, Responsibility

"I doubt that the imagination can be suppressed. If you truly eradicated it in a child, he would grow up to be an eggplant."

Imagination, Doubt

"What you love, you will love. What you undertake you will complete. You are a fulfiller of hope; you are to be relied on. But seventeen years give little armor against despair. Consider, Arren. To refuse death is to refuse life."

Philosophy, Love, Hope, Despair, Life