Novelistic Insight Quotes

Historians have to deal with facts and they are committed to the facts. The trouble is that facts are imperfect. The novelist comes up with an imaginary structure. This is not what happened. It is what could have happened. And sometimes this brings more understanding …

Sometimes a novelist can get closer to the truth than the historian can.

Historians and journalists always have agendas, but if I want to find out what's going on in South Africa, I read Nadine Gordimer or John Coetzee because they offer novelistic truth.

A great novelist must open the reader's heart, allow the reader to remember the vastness and glory -- and shame and shabbiness -- of what it is to be human.

I identify entirely with Jane Austen's point of view, on everything.

I became a virtuoso of deceit. It wasn't pleasure I was after, it was knowledge. I consulted the strictest moralists to learn how to appear, philosophers to find out what to think and novelists to see what I could get away with.

The novel is a big space, and a lot can happen. Just think about the parts of your life. How do we account for our own contradictions? The only way to understand them is to let them exist, as truths that indicate something about character. People are built of elements that don't fit together - and the conflict of that is their essential drive.

The historian will tell you what happened. The novelist will tell you what it felt like.