A Quote by Jane Austen

I am no indiscriminate novel reader. The mere trash of the common circulating library I hold in the highest contempt.

Jane Austen

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Jane Austen
British - Novelist
December 16, 1775 - July 18, 1817

The novel that an author writes is often not the novel that the reader reads, and most of the 'messages' in a novel are put there by the reader. There's nothing wrong with that, of course. That's how literature functions.

Ken Liu

I am a novelist. I traffic in subtleties, and my goal in writing a novel is to leave the reader not knowing what to think. A good novel shouldn't have a point.

Teju Cole

Another reason I think the novel will survive is that the reader has to work in a novel. In a film, you are presented with someone else's imagination exactly bodied out. The marvelous thing about a novel is that every reader will imagine even the very simplest sentence slightly differently.

John Fowles

Mathematicians do not write for the circulating library.

George Henry Lewes

A newspaper is a circulating library with high blood pressure.

Arthur Baer

Maggie Shipstead takes hold of the reader and doesn't let go. Astonish Me is a haunting, powerful novel.

Dani Shapiro

A circulating library in a town is as an evergreen tree of diabolical knowledge.

Richard Brinsley Sheridan

Flirtation is a circulating library, in which we seldom ask twice for the same volume.

Nathaniel Parker Willis

Scandal is great entertainment because it allows people to feel contempt, a moral emotion that gives feelings of moral superiority while asking nothing in return. With contempt you don't need to right the wrong (as with anger) or flee the scene (as with fear or disgust). And the best of all, contempt is made to share. Stories about the moral failings of others are among the most common kinds of gossip, they are a stable of talk radio, and they offer a ready way for people to show that they share a common moral orientation.

Jonathan Haidt

"Unputdownable" is, I suppose, something we all dream of, maybe without knowing it. I realized, some time ago, that a novel can hold a lot, and it made sense that this one was not of the sleek and economical variety, but instead the "full" type. Novel as piñata. And the reader does the whacking. I had a central idea, which is to look at what happens to talent over time.

Meg Wolitzer

Identify the moral dilemma driving the novel. the successful novel will haunt a reader because it deals with some ethical or moral dilemma that makes the reader wonder what he or she would do in the protagonist's place.

Rick Riordan

I read a lot. I am an inveterate reader. I always have a novel going.

Tom Sizemore

If I am going to trash others for their dumb predictions, I must at least hold myself to the same sort of accountability.

Barry Ritholtz

The writer's job is not to write a novel, hold it up and say, “Here I am,” but to write a novel, hold it up and say, “Here YOU are.

Rita Mae Brown

The book is finished by the reader. A good novel should invite the reader in and let the reader participate in the creative experience and bring their own life experiences to it, interpret with their own individual life experiences. Every reader gets something different from a book and every reader, in a sense, completes it in a different way.

Alan Lightman

Entering a library, I am always stuck by the way in which a certain vision of the world is imposed upon the reader through its categories and its order.

Alberto Manguel

A Quote by Jane Austen

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