I have always known that writing fiction had little effect on the world; that if it did, young men would not have gone to war after The Iliad.

Good fiction is made of that which is real, and reality is difficult to come by.

Don't make a novel to establish a principle of political economy. You will spoil both.

The love of novels is the preference of sentiment to the senses.

The final test for a novel will be our affection for it, as it is the test of our friends, and of anything else which we cannot define.

A novel is based on evidence, + or -x, the unknown quantity being the temperament of the novelist, and the unknown quantity always modifies the effect of the evidence, and sometimes transforms it entirely.

It is the function of the novelist to reveal the hidden life at its source: to tell us more about Queen Victoria than could be known, and thus to produce a character who is not the Queen Victoria of history.

History is a novel which did take place; a novel is history that could take place.

The subject of a novel is not the plot. Who remembers what happened to Lucien de Rebempre in the end?

He wrote a novel, and it was not really such a bad novel as the critics later called it, although it was a very poor novel.