Novelists Quotes

My temperament is not geared to that of a novelist.

The essay is a wonderful medium. I might mention that some writers who longed to be novelists were better as essayists: Sontag, Baldwin, Vidal, Mary McCarthy, Mailer.

More than anything I am a novelist. But for me, an author's job is not only to create linguistically accomplished works. As an author I also want to stimulate discussion.

The ancient historians gave us delightful fiction in the form of fact; the modern novelist presents us with dull facts under the guise of fiction.

I'm a novelist, not a social scientist or a commentator.

Age could not wither nor custom stale her infinite monotony: in fact, neither Age nor Custom could do anything (as they said, their voices rising) with the American novelist Gertrude Johnson.

Salvation is an individual relationship with God. I've always considered myself to be a devotional poet, and I consider myself to be a devotional novelist.

I don't think I'm a natural novelist. Plot is definitely one of my weaker points. I've been working on it a long time, and it's not getting much better.

Not until my middle thirties did I consider myself a novelist.

I'm not a reader of young adult fiction for the simple reason that these novelists are writing for adolescents, so they are not writing for me.

Nicholas Sparks recently went on record as saying he is a greater novelist than Cormac McCarthy. This is true in the same sense that I am a better novelist than William Shakespeare.

Kingsley Amis was one of a trio of brilliant comic novelists who made English literature sparkle in the twentieth century.

My father was a screenwriter, but he was also a novelist.

I'm a novelist. Fortunately I don't have to rule the world.

As an historical novelist - there are few jobs more retrospective.

A novelist is someone who sits around the house all day in his underwear, trying not to smoke.

The second person to write a story about a young boy and an escaped slave on the Mississippi wasn't a novelist, he was a typist.

Sometimes I think that novelists suffer from P.C.S.: Perpetual Childhood Syndrome.

The great thing about being a novelist is that you organize your own day.

Novelists and poets have existed side by side forever.

I’ve always said to people, "I don’t care what you call me as long as the checks don’t bounce and the family gets fed." But I never saw myself that way. I just saw myself as a novelist.

You tell me your favorite novelists and I'll tell you whom you vote for, or whether you vote at all.

I think most novelists I know, certainly including me, feel the novels choose them rather than vice-versa.

The writer - more especially the novelist - who has not, at one moment or another, considered his publisher unworthy of him, has still to be conceived.

Novelists who treat violence and cruelty as something to be exploited for their effect, or to enjoy the pleasure of an evacuation, are carriers of a singularly unpleasant disease.

The novelists of the nineteeth century had all the luck. They had a huge and easily pleased public and the world they surveyed had every appearance of permanence.

The novelist can't successfully depict such horrifying reality. But she can, and must, try, to bear witness. There are many ways of doing this; the mode I prefer is indirect.

For purposes of marketing, writers are designated as poets, novelists, or something else. But writing is about matchmaking, an attempt to marry sensations with apt words.

The novelist is more a marathon runner than long-distance runner and the kind of courage it takes working in such isolation cannot be underestimated. I really respect my fellow writers on this front.

I used to describe myself as a comic novelist, but my concerns seem to have darkened over the past few years.

The lesson you have to learn as novelist is how to be collaborative, and how to say, "I don't get to dictate this."

I am looking for the novelists whose writing is an extension of their intellect rather than an extension of their neurosis.

Most novelists write about twisted lives.

If the novelist isn't surprised by where his book ends up, he or she probably hasn't written anything worth remembering.

It is less the business of the novelist to tell us what happened than to show how it happened.

The makers of the short story have rarely been good novelists.

I am a novelist at heart.

I am the luckiest novelist in the world. I was a first-time novelist who wasn't awash in rejection slips, whose manuscript didn't disappear in slush piles. I have had a wonderful time.

Among the many problems which beset the novelist, not the least weighty is the choice of the moment at which to begin his novel.

A novelist is, like all mortals, more fully at home on the surface of the present than in the ooze of the past.

A novelist must preserve a childlike belief in the importance of things which common sense considers of no great consequence.

Things were easier for the old novelists who saw people all of a piece. Speaking generally, their heroes were good through and through, their villains wholly bad.

Just as the painter thinks with his brush and paints the novelist thinks with his story.

The novelist, quite rightly, fears the psychoanalyst as both an enemy and a usurper.

I started writing short fiction very briefly, as I imagine is the case for some novelists.

If you write a screenplay that gets circulated, you have a bigger readership than any literary novelist. And it's an educated audience as well.

Novelists who get shitty about screenwriting invariably can't do it, or they can't hack it in the world of what's really, in truth, very bold and very public enterprise.

I recognize myself to be an intensely naive person. Most novelists are, despite frequent pretensions to deep socio-political insight.

Lauren Kirshner creates a first-person narrator you never stop rooting for. . . . [Where We Have to Go] highlights Kirshner as a new novelist to watch. A very strong, original debut.

...he was after all, a novelist...and a novelist was simply a fellow who got paid to tell lies. The bigger the lies, the better the pay.