A novel is not an allegory, I said as the period was about to come to an end. It is the sensual experience of another world. If you don't enter that world, hold your breath with the characters and become involved in their destiny, you won't be able to empathize, and empathy is at the heart of the novel. This is how you read a novel: you inhale the experience. So start breathing. Azar Nafisi
Some Similar Quotes
  1. A novel is never anything but a philosophy expressed in images. And in a good novel the philosophy has disappeared into the images. - Albert Camus

  2. Semua orang pernah patah hati. All you have to do is move on. - Nina Ardianti

  3. If you only write when you’re inspired you may be a fairly decent poet, but you’ll never be a novelist because you’re going to have to make your word count today and those words aren’t going to wait for you whether you’re inspired or not.... - Neil Gaiman

  4. A short story is a love affair, a novel is a marriage. A short story is a photograph; a novel is a film. - Lorrie Moore

  5. In writing a novel, when in doubt, have two guys come through the door with guns. - Raymond Chandler

More Quotes By Azar Nafisi
  1. You don't read Gatsby, I said, to learn whether adultery is good or bad but to learn about how complicated issues such as adultery and fidelity and marriage are. A great novel heightens your senses and sensitivity to the complexities of life and of individuals,...

  2. Most great works of the imagination were meant to make you feel like a stranger in your own home. The best fiction always forced us to question what we took for granted. It questioned traditions and expectations when they seemed to immutable.

  3. Do not, under any circumstances, belittle a work of fiction by trying to turn it into a carbon copy of real life; what we search for in fiction is not so much reality but the epiphany of truth.

  4. A novel is not an allegory.... It is the sensual experience of another world. If you don't enter that world, hold your breath with the characters and become involved in their destiny, you won't be able to empathize, and empathy is at the heart of...

  5. Our personal fears and emotions are at times stronger than public danger. By keeping them secret, we allow them to remain malignant. You need to be able to articulate something if you want it to go away, and to do that, you must acknowledge that...

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