Novelists Quotes

I suppose I am a born novelist, for the things I imagine are more vital and vivid to me than the things I remember.

I'm really aware that in fiction, women are pretty much equal. There's a lot of very successful women novelists. Not so much [for women writers working] in film.

They can't yank a novelist like they can a pitcher. A novelist has to go the full nine, even if it kills him.

It may happen in the next hundred years that the English novelists of the present day will come to be valued as we now value the artists and craftsmen of the late eighteenth century.

There was never a good biography of a good novelist. There couldn't be. He is too many people if he's any good.

Novelists... fashioning nets to sustain and support the reader as he falls helplessly through the chaos of his own existence.

I had thought of writing, actually, and that later on I'd be a novelist.

I have a wonderful editor who believes in fiction and poetry. She herself is a novelist and poet.

I'm not a philosopher. I am the next thing to a jock, which is a novelist.

I think of a designer as a processor of information — like a scriptwriter or a novelist.

The greatest benefit we owe to the artist, whether painter, poet, or novelist, is the extension of our sympathies.

I'm proud to be a crime novelist. What I've chosen is the best way to convey the questions I'm trying to raise.

A novelist is a man who doesn't like his mother.

The best novelist of my generation is an Italian living in Paris, still working and improving - Italo Calvino.

I'd defend the right for any novelist to experiment with form or language, but if people don't take to it, don't react by making out that they are thick.

Henry James would have been vastly improved as a novelist by a few whiffs of the Chicago stockyard.

Sometimes I wonder why I'm a novelist right now. There is no definite career reason why I became a writer. Something happened, and I became a writer. And now I'm a successful writer.

The next time the novelist rings the bell I will not stir though the meeting-house burn down.

Where does any novelist pick up any character? For the most part, in town, to be sure.

I only became a novelist because I thought I had missed my chance to become a historian.

When I began to read as an adult, my first big enthusiasm was Evelyn Waugh. I read almost exclusively novelists of a generation back. I did the Russians, then I started getting more up to date.

Only a small percentage of novelists, painters, musicians, scientists, anywhere in the world, are talented. But there are many more in Hollywood than one would expect from looking movies.

I guess I've always been an aspiring novelist. I went to Princeton and wrote a novel for my thesis.

Rebecca Goldstein is a rare find among contemporary novelists: she has intellectual muscle as well as a tender emotional reach.

Novelists have to be adept at controlling the flow of information, and, most crucially, they have to be in charge of the narrative.

By measuring individual human worth, the novelist reveals the full enormity of the State

Stories in which the destruction of society occurs are explorations of social fears and issues that filmmakers, novelists, playwrights, painters have been examining for a long time.

Just as we bemoan the passing away of the Great Novel, a great novelist is likely to emerge, perhaps even from Denmark or Switzerland, to prove us wrong.

One of the admirable features of British novelists is that they have no scruple about setting their stories in foreign settings with wholly foreign personnel.

I am a master of fiction. I am also the greatest crime novelist who ever lived. I am to the crime novel in specific what Tolstoy is to the Russian novel and what Beethoven is to music.

Being an unpublished novelist has about as much social acceptability as being a shopping bag lady.

The best of our fiction is by novelists who allow that it is as good as they can give, and the worst by novelists who maintain that they could do much better if only the public would let them.

A novelist is on the cusp between someone who knows everything and someone who knows nothing.

Some novelists are luckier than others in the eras of their formative intellectual years, but all Weltanschauungs return, which means that most novelists have at least a chance of a revival.

Novelists of a conservative or more purely aesthetic bent hold up better on the surface, but their novels go in and out of fashion according to relevance or irrelevance.

Novelists never have to footnote.

Every novelist should possess a hermaphroditic imagination.

Novelists are always resisting autobiographical readings of their work, because they know how false those can be.

Some Pulitzer winners - novelists - have confided to me that getting the prize screwed them up. It messed with their heads. That hasn't been my experience.

Being a novelist is hard for anyone - male or female. You don't get to quit your day job.

What the podcast novelists do isnt all that different from what self-publishers do. We put the books out in different formats, but the goal is the same: build an audience and attract a publisher.

Because I'm a novelist, I think in terms of structure. The way I keep going is through structure. It's what inspires me and pushes me through.

The biggest downside to being a novelist is writing the novel.

You get spoiled as a novelist because you get to be the director and the editor, and you play all the parts, but as a screenwriter, you are a bit down the ladder.

Dostoevsky is such a bad writer it is hard to take him seriously as a novelist, though he is a wonderful philosopher.

The novel is resilient, and so are novelists.

If you are a novelist of a certain type of termperament, then what you really want to do is re-invent the world. God wasn't too bad a novelist except he was a Realist.

Shun security, I advise aspiring novelists when they complain to me that they are stuck. Get disoriented. Maybe your agonizing writing block isnt agonizing enough. Your enemy is comfort.

There is a part of me in every character, naturally. That's why novelists rarely write good autobiographies. You start one and it becomes another novel.

I'm a very old-fashioned novelist. I write 19th-century novels, where a lot of rules apply.