novelty

I can't understand why a person will take a year to write a novel when he can easily buy one for a few dollars.

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.

Yes, oh dear, yes, the novel tells a story.

This is not a novel to be tossed aside lightly. It should be thrown with great force.

It is only a short step from exaggerating what we can find in the world to exaggerating our power to remake the world. Expecting more novelty than there is, more greatness than there is, and more strangeness than there is, we imagine ourselves masters of a plastic universe. But a world we can shape to our will is a shapeless world.

Where we cannot invent, we may at least improve; we may give somewhat of novelty to that which was old, condensation to that which was diffuse, perspicuity to that which was obscure, and currency to that which was recondite.

All my life I have been trying to learn, to read, to see and hear, and to write. At sixty-five I began my first novel and after the five years, lacking a month, I took to finish it, I was still traveling, still a seeker.

The very essence of the creative is its novelty, and hence we have no standard by which to judge it.

What a chimera then is man! What a novelty! What a monster, what a chaos, what a subject of contradiction, what a prodigy! Judge of all things, feeble earthworm, depository of truth, a sink of uncertainty and error, the glory and the shame of the universe.

Novelty is an essential attribute of the beautiful.