I think Fielding is unquestionably the central novelist of the eighteenth century. Richardson is a horrible excrescence in my view: pious and lecherous. Martin Amis
Fiction is the only way to redeem the formlessness of life. Martin Amis, Essays
It’s 1749. London is in the grip of addiction. Gin. It’s dirt cheap. And it’s turning the capital into a nest of vice and destruction. Henry Hitchings, Birth of the British Novel, BBC 2011
Tom Jones is one of the greatest novels of all time ... The novel was a new and emerging art form. Fielding saw in the novel the potential to challenge and renovate everything that was wrong with society. And all under the guise of entertainment ... It was a dangerous and subversive enterprise. Fielding was one of a handful of trailblazers using the novel to challenge the norms of British society. In just eighty years writers including Daniel Defoe, Jonathan Swift, Laurence Sterne and Fanny Burney would lay down the basic templates for the novel. ibid.
The novel as we know it emerged in Britain in the early eighteenth century. The nation at that time was in the flush of economic prosperity. ibid.
New laws surrounding censorship and copyright gave authors more freedom and commercial opportunity than before. ibid.
What’s so brilliant and original about Defoe is the way he pares prose back to its bare essentials. There is nothing florid here. No poetry. ibid.
Moll Flanders, published in 1732, is the tale of a harlot on the make. Her motto: with money in the pocket one is at home anywhere. She dies a rich woman. ibid.
I love how all the contradictions inherent in Swift’s personality are expressed in Gulliver’s Travels. ibid.
Richardson is a printer before he becomes a novelist ... Richardson became a celebrity, surrounded by cultivated ladies. ibid.
Clarissa, published in 1748, charts the pursuit, rape and ultimate death of its heroine. ibid.
This was Henry Fielding: Justice of the Peace, founder of the Bow Street Runners, a man devoted to social reform. He also recognised the role of art and entertainment ... He turned to the novel ... His friend and mentor the painter William Hogarth. ibid.
Tom may be a foundling but he is more generous and humane than the high-born characters who surround him. ibid.
I find Tristram Shandy pretty much impossible to describe. On the surface it’s about a group of eccentric characters who live at Shandy Hall. It’s also a carnivalesque philosophical romp stuffed with references to its own creation. The word shandy was in Stern’s time Yorkshire slang for a crack-brained individual ... This is a landmark book ... He’s not even born till the fourth of his nine volumes ... It’s still the ultimate experimental British novel. ibid.
The inventor of the Gothic novel is Robert Walpole. ibid.
The last ground-breaking novel of the era. It was the work of a revolutionary philosopher – William Godwin. In 1793 Godwin’s essay An Inquiry Concerning Political Justice introduced the idea of anarchism. The following year he published a novel Caleb Williams. ibid.
It’s no wonder that truth is stranger than fiction. Fiction has to make sense. Mark Twain
Fiction is based on reality unless you're a fairytale artist. Hunter S Thompson
Fiction is like a spider’s web, attached ever so lightly perhaps, but still attached to life at all four corners. Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own
Good fiction’s job is to comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable. David Foster Wallace
Fiction reveals truth that reality obscures. Ralph Waldo Emerson
No fiction is worth reading except for entertainment. If it entertains and is clean, it is good literature, or its kind. If it forms the habit of reading, in people who might not read otherwise, it is the best literature. Edgar Rice Burroughs
I have always held the old-fashioned opinion that the primary object of work of fiction should be to tell a story. Wilkie Collins, The Woman in White
Fiction is life with the dull bits left out. Clive James
We live in a world ruled by fictions of every kind – mass merchandising, advertising, politics conducted as a branch of advertising, the instant translation of science and technology into popular imagery, the increasing blurring and intermingling of identities within the realm of consumer goods, the preempting of any free or original imaginative response to experience by the television screen. We live inside an enormous novel. For the writer in particular it is less and less necessary for him to invent the fictional content of his novel. The fiction is already there. The writer’s task is to invent the reality. J G Ballard, introduction to French edition of Crash
Literature is a luxury; fiction is a necessity. G K Chesterton, The Defendant