The novel discovered the various dimensions of existence one by one: with Cervantes and his contemporaries, it inquires into the nature of adventure; with Richardson it begins to examine "what happens inside", to unmask the secret life of the feelings; with Balzac it discovers man's rootedness in history; with Flaubert, it explores the terra previously incognita of the everyday; with Tolstoy, it focuses on the intrusion of the irrational in human behavior and decisions. It probes time: the elusive past with Proust, the elusive present with Joyce. With Thomas Mann, it examines the role of the myths from the remote past that control our present actions.
- Man desires a world where good and evil can be clearly distinguished, for he has an innate and irreprensible desire to judge before he understands. Religions and ideologies are founded on this desire [...] This "either-or" encapsulates an inability to tolerate the essential relativity of things human.
- The path of the novel emerges as a parallel history of the Modern Era.
- In the course of the Modern Era, Cartesian rationality has corroded, one after the other, all the values inherited from the Middle Ages. But just when reason wins a total victory, pure irrationality seizes the world stage, because there is no longer any generally accepted value system to block its path.
- The novelist discover what only the novel can discover: they demonstrate how, under the conditions of the "terminal paradoxes", all existential categories suddenly change their meaning.
- As a model of this Western World, grounded in the relativity and ambiguity of things human, the novel is incompatible with the totalitarian universe. This incompatibility is not only political or moral, but ontological. Totalitarian Truth excludes relativity, doubt, questioning; it can never accommodate to the spirit of the novel.
- The history of the novel is constituted by a sequence of discoveries.
- If the novel disappear, it will do so not because it has exhausted its powers, but because it exists in a world grown alien to it.
- If the novel's reason to be is to keep "the world of life" under a permanent light and to protect us from "the forgetting of being", it is not more than ever necessary today that the novel should exist?
- The common spirit of the mass media, camouflaged by political diversity, is the spirit of our time. And this spirit is contrary to the spirit of the novel.