Novelists Quotes

The art of fiction does not begin until the novelist thinks of his story as a matter to be shown, to be so exhibited that it will tell itself.

Whether you're an unpublished novelist or a sixteen-time New York Times bestselling author, you can always improve your craft.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

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

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

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.

Copywriters, journalists, mainstream authors, ghostwriters, bloggers and advertising creatives have as much right to think of themselves as good writers as academics, poets, or literary novelists.

Grabbing readers by the imagination is a writer's job.

It is true that novelists are shameless and obey no decent law, and they are not to be trusted on any account, but some Mysteries even they must honor.

I am not an academic who happens to have written a novel. I am a novelist who happens to be quite good academically.

I hated being a novelist when I was 20 - I had nothing to write about.

Drawing Dead is a brilliant noir from one of Australia's most exciting new novelists.

I realized that my identity as a novelist was private. Only I knew how much of a novelist I was!

RICE-WATER, n. A mystic beverage secretly used by our most popular novelists and poets to regulate the imagination and narcotize the conscience.

The novelist does not long to see the lion eat grass. He realizes that one and the same God created the wolf and the lamb, then smiled, “seeing that his work was good.”

I always wanted to be a fiction writer, but I couldn't figure out how you could be a novelist and make any money, which continues to be a problem for novelists the world over.

I think I'm like most novelists in that my books have gotten farther and farther away from autobiography the longer I've been writing them.

I do think there's some aspect of being a novelist that is a little crazy making.

If I actually believed that the progress of human understanding depended on our crop of contemporary novelists, I would shoot myself.

I know I'm a rare person, a trained scientist who writes fiction, because so few contemporary novelists engage with science.

Henry James claim that if you want to be a novelist you should be somebody on whom nothing is lost.

I was a novelist before I was a TV screenwriter. Actually, as a kid, I think I'd always wanted to be a writer, but never thought that I would be one.

Horror writers can write about everything in the real world that a mainstream novelist can--plus the supernatural, which is the most fertile field for metaphor imaginable.

I'm really influenced by Southern novelists, not many movie people. More like John Faulkner, William Faulkner, Erskine Caldwell, Flannery O'Connor, John Steinbeck, and people like that.

Charlie Huston, who showran the first season [of Powers], is a novelist, and likes to internalize fiction as a novelist does.

I couldn't be a novelist for instance. It feels like a very lonely endeavor. I don't know that I could survive the solitude of that.

Many thousands of people have had the experience of finding the first friend, and it is none the less a wonder; as great a wonder (pace the novelists) as first love, or even greater.

Well I'm not a novelist. I've only written one book and that is a memoir.

I wanted to write about the Korean War, but I had no entry into it that made the kind of sense it needs to make for a novelist.

Novelists should never allow themselves to weary of the study of real life.

I think, in common with a lot of novelists, I wasn't the most athletic guy at school.

Outcasts may grow up to be novelists and filmmakers and computer tycoons, but they will never be the athletic ruling class.

Morality in the novel is the trembling instability of the balance. When the novelist puts his thumb in the scale, to pull down the balance to his own predilection, that is immorality.

I'm a novelist. I think fiction is important or I wouldn't be doing it, but most of it's bad.

I always think the novelist should go to the culture's dark places and poke around. Pose a lot of hard questions.

I have an English literature degree. I wanted to be the next great American novelist from a very early age, but I put it aside for a while, because I got very realistic at one point.

I’ve had the pleasure of hearing The Novelists perform live. They are gifted songwriters and talented musicians with strong lead voices. This is a band with lots of heart & soul.

Maybe with "Californication" the character was partly based on Rick Moody. I read him and Jay McInerney, the templates for this bad boy novelist.

I'm a novelist, that's how I make my livelihood, and I concentrate on the novels.

A novelist needs to know his own strong points and weak points.

I became fascinated by the fact that people write to give away rather than write to be read. It's the difference between playwrights and novelists.

Not all popular novelists are good, but all good novelists are, sooner or later, popular.

The Novelist, afraid his ideas may be foolish, slyly puts them in the mouth of some other fool and reserves the right to disavow them.

You become a serious novelist by living long enough.

One connection I see between novelists and terrorists is that we both attempt to alter consciousness.

I'm a novelist, period. An American novelist.

I think novelists perform many useful tasks for their fellow citizens, but one of the most valuable is this: to enable us to see ourselves as others see us.

I do not think men have more talent. There are a great many women in the arts; novelists, painters, sculptors, poets-but the proportion is far lower in the field of song writing.

I want to be a popular novelist who's also serious, or a serious novelist who's also very accessible.

Things that appear on the front page of the newspaper as 'fact' are far more dangerous than the games played by a novelist, and can lead to wars.

It is the job of the novelist to touch the reader.