Novelists Quotes

It is not the office of a novelist to show us how to behave ourselves; it is not the business of fiction to teach us anything.

I do not seek the good of others as a sanction for my right to exist, nor do I recognize the good of others as a justification for their seizure of my property or their destruction of my life.

I grew up as a reader as well as a movie-lover, so many of the novelists I admired - and so many of the great filmmakers I loved - were self-taught.

All the reasons which made the initiation of physical force evil, make the retaliatory use of physical force a moral imperative.

The nation which once held the creed that greatness is achieved by production, is now told that it is achieved by squalor.

The contemporary American novelist benefits in a way from being ignored. It makes you angrier and makes you want to go into all of those places where you shouldnt.

Great sorrow or great joy should bring intense hunger--not abstinence from food, as our novelists will have it.

Sometimes seeing everything just gets in the way.

The novelist works neither to correct nor to condone, not at all to comfort, but to make what's told alive.

Of Dickens' style it is impossible to speak in praise. It is jerky, ungrammatical, and created by himself in defiance of rules... No young novelist should ever dare to imitate the style of Dickens.

I never see a novel as a film while I'm writing it. Mostly because novels and films are so different, and I'm such an internal novelist

A novelist has mad a fictional representation of life. I doing so, he has revealed to us more significance, it may be, than he could find in life itself.

A great novelist must open the reader's heart, allow the reader to remember the vastness and glory -- and shame and shabbiness -- of what it is to be human.

Not since Lord of the Flies has a novelist written with such perceptiveness about the potential for harm that lurks within the innocence of childhood.

When men abandon reason, physical force becomes their only means of dealing with one another and of settling disagreements.

Never underestimate the Pricey.

Being called a 'bad citizen' is a compliment to a novelist, at least to my mind. That's exactly what we ought to do.

I loathe your ideals because I know no worse injustice than the giving of the undeserved.

A novelist who ranks with Proust , Kafka , Musil and his friend James Joyce as one of the enduring pillars of Modernism.

How can a novelist achieve atonement when, with her absolute power of deciding outcomes, she is also God?

As a novelist you have just unlimited budget, total creative control. You really get to have your cake - all the cake - and then you can have a second cake if you wanted to.

We're currently living with a generation of established novelists who are embarrassingly out of date with respect to social networking, internet skills, and so on.

the best often die by their own hand just to get away, and those left behind can never quite understand why anybody would ever want to get away from them

That is the dream of all novelists-that one of their characters will become 'somebody.'

The thing I love about Dickens is the omniscient, omnipotent narrator, and the great confidence of the narrator, which marks 19th-century novelists in general and Dickens in particular.

Shyness is a curious thing, because, like quicksand, it can strike people at any time, and also, like quicksand, it usually makes its victims look down.

Novelists have to love humanity to write anything worthwhile. Poets have to love themselves.

Money is the necessity that frees us from necessity. Of all novelists in any country, Trollope best understands the role of money. Compared with him even Balzac is a romantic.

To what degree are historians chroniclers of the truth and to what degree are they just novelists, frankly?

I believe that only poetry counts ... A great novelist is first of all a great poet.

I'm not a novelist, I'm a storyteller. There is no art in what I do, no mystique.

All novelists should live in two different worlds: a real one and an unreal one.

You're a wizard, Harry.

I wrote four novels, but then I realized that the world didn't need me to be a novelist, but the world could use me as a nonfiction writer.

The only true aristocracy is that of consciousness.

Besties before testes.

I try very hard to be fair, and I look for ironies. In a way, I live on ironies as a novelist.

Whether you're an unpublished novelist or a sixteen-time New York Times bestselling author, you can always improve your craft. You can always become a better writer.

Personally, I have never wished I were a male novelist.

I want you to be afraid to turn the page (and to do that) you need to show right from the beginning that you're playing for keeps.

The novel is very much alive, indeed. In Toronto at the Sixth Annual International Festival of Authors (October 1985) I listened to novelists by the dozen.

... the novelist is bound by the reasonable possibilities, not the probabilities, of his culture.

Human nature provides the lyrics, and we novelists just compose the music.

I can be as contrary as I choose.

What terrorists gain, novelists lose.

I resist when someone calls me a novelist: it implies some kind of inherent superiority of the novel. I'm not a novelist, I'm a writer.

All good novelists have bad memories.

The great European novel started out as entertainment, and every true novelist is nostalgic for it. In fact, the themes of those great entertainments are terribly serious-think of Cervantes!

The business of the poet and the novelist is to show the sorriness underlying the grandest things and the grandeur underlying the sorriest things.

But in general, for the purposes of most novelists, the number of objects genuinely necessary for. . .describing a scene will be found to be very small.