Quotation by Mary McCarthy

If a criterion were wanted for telling a novel from a fable or a tale or a romance (or a drama), a simple rule-of-thumb would be the absence of the supernatural. In fables and fairy tales, as everyone knows, birds and beasts talk. In novels, they don't; if you find birds and beasts talking in a book you are reading you can be sure it is not a novel. That takes care, for example, of Animal Farm. Men in novels may behave like beasts, but beasts in novels may not behave like men. That takes care of Gulliver's Travels, in case anyone were to mistake it for a novel. The characters in a novel must obey the laws of nature.