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Aspects of the Novel - E.M. Forster Quotes

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  • "A critic has no right to the narrowness which is the frequent prerogative of the creative artist. He has to have a wide outlook or he has not anything at all."
    - E.M. Forster, Aspects of the Novel

  • "We are to visualize the English novelists not as floating down the stream [of time] ... but as seated together in a room, a circular room, a sort of British museum reading room, all writing their novels simultaneously."
    - E.M. Forster, Aspects of the Novel

  • "The final test of a novel will be our affection for it, as it is the test of our friends, of anything else which we cannot define."
    - E.M. Forster, Aspects of the Novel

  • "The time-sequence cannot be destroyed without carrying in its ruin all that should have taken its place; the novel that would express values only becomes unintelligible and therefore valueless."
    - E.M. Forster, Aspects of the Novel

  • "A memoir is history, it is based on evidence. A novel is based on evidence plus or minus 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."
    - E.M. Forster, Aspects of the Novel

  • "These are the creatures whom the novelist proposes to introduce as characters into books; these, or creatures plausibly like them."
    - E.M. Forster, Aspects of the Novel

  • "All history, all our experience, teaches us that no human relationship is constant, it is as unstable as the living beings who compose it, and they must balance like jugglers if it is to remain; if it is constant it is no longer a human relationship but a social habit, the emphasis in it has passed from love to marriage."
    - E.M. Forster, Aspects of the Novel

  • "Any strong emotion brings with it the illusion of permanence, and the novelists have seized upon this. They usually end their books with marriage, and we do not object because we lend them our dreams."
    - E.M. Forster, Aspects of the Novel

  • "The test of a round character is whether it is capable of surprising in a convincing way. If it never surprises, it is flat. If it does not convince, it is a flat pretending to be round. It has the incalculability of life about it—life within the pages of a book."
    - E.M. Forster, Aspects of the Novel

  • "The novelist who betrays too much interest in his own method can never be more than interesting; he has given up the creation of character and summoned us to help analyze his own mind, and a heavy drop in the emotional thermometer results."
    - E.M. Forster, Aspects of the Novel

  • "Why place an angel on a different basis from a stockbroker? Once in the realm of the fictious, what difference is there between an apparition and a mortgage?"
    - E.M. Forster, Aspects of the Novel

  • "The stuff of daily life will be tugged and strained in various directions, the earth will be given little tilts mischievous or pensive, spot lights will fall on objects that have no reason to anticipate or welcome them, and tragedy herself, though not excluded, will have a fortuitous air as if a word would disarm her."
    - E.M. Forster, Aspects of the Novel

  • "Expansion. That is the idea the novelist must cling to. Not completion. Not rounding off but opening out. When the symphony is over we feel that the notes and tunes composing it have been liberated, they have found in the rhythm of the whole their individual freedom. Cannot the novel be like that? Is there not something of it [that can bring us to] a larger existence than was possible at the time?"
    - E.M. Forster, Aspects of the Novel

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