Novelists Quotes

Every Observer writer wants to be a novelist.

Don't be a novelist --- be a statistician. Much more scope for the imagination.

The object of the novelist is to keep the reader entirely oblivious of the fact that the author exists - even of the fact he is reading a book.

Flora sighed. It was curious that persons who lived what the novelists called a rich emotional life always seemed to be a bit slow on the uptake.

If you tell a novelist, 'Life's not like that', he has to do something about it. The poet simply replies, 'No, but I am.'

In effect I am not a novelist, but rather a failed essayist who started to write novels because he didn't know how to write essays.

You simply cannot invent any conspiracy theory so ridiculous and obviously satirical that some people somewhere don't already believe it.

It is in their 'good' characters that novelists make, unawares, the most shocking self- revelations.

Read a thousand books, and your words will flow like a river.

Memories do not always soften with time; some grow edges like knives.

A novelist can’t be without a kimono and pen!(Shigure)

I knew Id always be a second-rate academic, and I thought, Well, Id rather be a second-rate novelist or even a third-rate one.

If this were fiction, could even the most brilliant novelist contrive to make credible so short a period in which pride had been subdued and prejudice overcome?

On lady novelists: As artists they're rot, but as providers they're oil wells; they gush. Norris said she never wrote a story unless it was fun to do. I understand Ferber whistles at her typewriter.

If the novelist shares his or her problems with the characters, he or she is able to study his personal unconscious.

I think novelists, when they write their books, end up having occasionally serving a purpose and playing roles that they never really fully either intended or even understood.

Sigmund Freud was a novelist with a scientific background. He just didn't know he was a novelist. All those damn psychiatrists after him, they didn't know he was a novelist either.

The few really great-the major novelists ... are significant in terms of the human awareness they promote; awareness of the possibilities of life.

An honest man is one who knows that he can't consume more than he has produced.

Historians tell the story of the past, novelists the story of the present.

No matter how little a man has he will find that he will always settle for less.

We all now tell stories by cutting from one dramatic scene to the next, whereas Victorian novelists felt free to write long passages of undramatic summary.

With a novelist, like a surgeon, you have to get a feeling that you've fallen into good hands - someone from whom you can accept the anesthetic with confidence.

Great novelists are philosopher novelists - that is, the contrary of thesis-writers.

If you act like a victim, you are likely to be treated as one.

Dreams cannot be tamed. Dreamers cannot be ruled.

We can sell our time, but we can't buy it back.

It is morally obscene to regard wealth as an anonymous, tribal product and to talk about 'redistributing' it.

The suspense in a novel is not only in the reader, but in the novelist himself, who is intensely curious too about what will happen to the hero.

Unfortunately for novelists, real life is getting way too funny and far-fetched.

Americans and their desire to be novelists, the American novel should be listed in medical dictionaries alongside Megalomania and Obsessional Neuroses.

Really, the novelist has the best casting since he doesn't have to cope with the actors and all the rest. -Alfred Hitchcock

To be a novelist, all I need is a pen and a piece of paper.

Not all novelists are power-hungry madman. Some are power-hungry madwomen.

A novelist should make you realize nothing is stable. If you don't believe anything with robustness, you're doing something more radical than anything else.

Expansion, that is the idea the novelist must cling to, not completion, not rounding off, but opening out.

After I convinced them that I was a harmless novelist, I actually got them to give me a tour of the harem - which is usually off limits for tourists.

I have been born more times than anybody except Krishna.

To ask a novelist to talk about his novels is like asking somebody to cook about their dancing.

The essayist has to follow a certain intellectual pattern. The novelist has the advantage of using fantasy, of being subjective.

A very important thing is not to make up your mind that you are any one thing.

The economy of a novelist is a little like that of a careful housewife who is unwilling to throw away anything that might perhaps serve its turn.

All good novelists have bad memories. What you remember comes out as journalism; what you forget goes into the compost of the imagination.

Every novelist should write something for children at least once in his lifetime.

What description of clouds and sunsets was to the old novelist, description of scientific apparatus and methods is to the modern Scientific Detective writer.

Novelists tell that piece of truth hidden at the bottom of every lie.

As far as he can achieve it, readability is as important for the scientific writer as it is for the novelist.

Most novelists I know went through a period of intense self-examination and self-loathing after the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center. I certainly did.

It is part of the novelist's convention not to mention soup and salmon and ducklings, as if soup and salmon and ducklings were of no importance.

It's the duty of all novelists, all painters, all musicians, all people who try to make art move: to look for something they feel authentically, without paying attention to styles.