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"A novel is an impression, not an argument; and there the matter must rest."
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"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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"I don't know where people got the idea that characters in books are supposed to be likable. Books are not in the business of creating merely likeable characters with whom you can have some simple identification with. Books are in the business of creating great stories that make you're brain go ahhbdgbdmerhbergurhbudgerbudbaaarr."
"I attempt to write a good novel. Whether it is literature or not is something that will be decided by the ages, not by me and not by a pack of critics around the globe."
"In books, that which is most generally interesting is what comes home to the most cherished private experience of the greatest number. It is not the book of him who has travelled the farthest over the surface of the globe, but of him who has lived the deepest and been the most at home."
"A cardinal principle of good fiction [is]: the theme and the plot of a novel must be integrated-as thoroughly integrated as mind and body or thought and action in a rational view of man."
Explore more quotes by Thomas Hardy
"Good business leaders create a vision, articulate the vision, passionately own the vision, and relentlessly drive it to completion."
"There are accents in the eye which are not on the tongue, and more tales come from pale lips than can enter an ear. It is both the grandeur and the pain of the remoter moods that they avoid the pathway of sound."
"I was court-martial in my absence, and sentenced to death in my absence, so I said they could shoot me in my absence."
"Everybody is so talented nowadays that the only people I care to honor as deserving real distinction are those who remain in obscurity."
"Her heart longed for some ark into which it could fly and be at rest. Rough or smooth she did not care, so long as it was warm."
"You are absolutely the most ethereal, least sensual woman I ever knew to exist without inhuman sexlessness."
"To see persons looking with children's eyes at any ordinary scenery, is a proof that they possess the charming faculty of drawing new sensations from an old experience..."
"If she had not been imprudence incarnate, she would not have acted as she did when she met Henchard by accident a day or two later."
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