“On the whole, I think you should write biographies of those you admire and respect, and novels about human beings who you think are sadly mistaken.” – Penelope Fitzgerald

“Writing a novel is actually searching for victims. As I write I keep looking for casualties. The stories uncover the casualties.” – John Irving

“Time passes, as the novelist says. The single most useful trick of fiction for our repair and refreshment: the defeat of time. A century of family saga and a ride up an escalator can take the same number of pages. Fiction sets any conversion rate, then changes it in a syllable. The narrator’s mother carries her child up the stairs and the reader follows, for days. But World War I passes in a paragraph. I needed 125 pages to get from Labor Day to Christmas vacation. In six more words, here’s spring.” – Richard Powers

“It is only a novel…or, in short, only some work in which the greatest powers of the mind are displayed, in which the most thorough knowledge of human nature, the happiest delineation of its varieties, the liveliest effusions of wit and humour, are conveyed to the world in the best-chosen language.” – Jane Austen

“The hard part about writing a novel is finishing it.” – Ernest Hemingway