The Novel Form Quotes

“A novel is interested in how one thing follows another; it is equally (arguably more) interested in what it feels like to live in time; in life lived by intensity. As a treatment of time, a novel activates not only curiosity in the reader (And then?) but memory: a form of attention that is accumulative as well as anticipatory, backward-reaching as well as forward-facing and itself capable of acting on time. That is, of repeating or extending the strategies of the narration. By skipping a bit of it. Or staying with it. Thickening it by reading a passage again.”
― Kate Briggs, The Long Form

“The novel, by working with the interplay of durations, and inviting the reader to interact with them, has the capacity to pay a double, triple, multiple allegiance to the weird workings of time, to our common sense idea of its ongoing sequence as well as to what living-in-time can actually feel like, filling it and distorting it.”
― Kate Briggs, The Long Form