Journalism allows its readers to witness history; fiction gives its readers an opportunity to live it.

The novelist screws up his courage in order to invest another two or three years in another attempt to float a boat of original design upon an invented ocean.

Readers of novels are a strange folk, upon whose probable or even possible tastes no wise book-maker would ever venture to bet.

Just as the painter thinks with his brush and paints the novelist thinks with his story.

A novel is what you call something that won't sell if you call it poems or short stories.

When the characters are really alive before their author, the latter does nothing but follow them in their action, in their words, in the situations which they suggest to him.

Ours is the first generation that has grown up with science-fiction ideas.

Fiction is to the grown man what play is to the child; it is there that he changes the atmosphere and tenor of his life.

Novels are sweets. All people with healthy literary appetites love them-almost all women; a vast number of clever, hardheaded men.

Fiction is nothing less than the subtlest instrument for self-examination and self-display that Mankind has invented yet.