Best Novelist Quotes

#1. You say that you hope I will be recognized as the best novelist of my generation. I want you to know now and know completely that that would mean to me absolutely nothing.

Jean Stafford

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

Gore Vidal

#3. I have remarked elsewhere that I regard the Almighty as not a bad novelist, except that He is a realist.

John Barth

#4. I was going to be the best failed novelist in Paris. That was certainly not the worst thing in the world that one could be.

Alan Furst

#5. Freud was just a novelist.

Peter Ackroyd

#6. Every true novelist listens for that suprapersonal wisdom, which explains why great novels are always a little more intelligent than their authors. Novelists who are more intelligent than their books should go into another line of work.

Milan Kundera

#7. I've been many kinds of writers in my career: novelist; tele-playwright; short story writer. As a high-school student, I wrote amateur pieces for fanzines, and I've written for Hollywood.

George R R Martin

#8. And then, as if written by the hand of a bad novelist, an incredible thing happened.

Jonathan Stroud

#9. Every thought and word that a novelist thinks or writes is part of that castle constructed from sands on the beach of Me, including the turret or rampart or moat he may have thought or written on behalf of someone or something else.

Steve Erickson

#10. The Truth about America's Silicon Valley-
Angels in the Silicon

Riveting and insightful regarding progressivism and the social upheavals living in the Silicon Valley.-

John Yoo, UC Berkeley Constitutional Lawyer, novelist, and public servant

Richard Theodor Kusiolek

#11. The novelist is the person who spends a lot of his or her day thinking about the human drama and emotional complexity.

Thane Rosenbaum

#12. I think back on that day when 16-year-old me scribbled on some silly piece of paper for some long-forgotten high school career-day project that my dream job was 'romance novelist.'

Sarah MacLean

#13. The common wisdom is that only about 1 percent of a novelist's research ends up in his or her book. In my experience, it's even less - closer to a tenth of a percent.

Gayle Lynds

#14. Maybe it's the spy novelist in me looking for a future plot, but I hope the U.S. and its allies are thinking how to operate 'unconventionally' in Iraq and Syria in ways that undermine the Islamic State.

David Ignatius

#15. I remember calling the council's cemetery department to ask about body decomposition in different soil types. Once they had verified that I was a novelist and not a sicko, they were extremely helpful.

Sara Sheridan

#16. Society is the stage on which manners are shown; novels are the literature. Novels are the journal or record of manners; and the new importance of these books derives from the fact, that the novelist begins to penetrate the surface, and treat this part of life more worthily.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

#17. I do have a very strong sense that most of the terrible things in life happen suddenly and unpredictably, and certainly can sweep you off in different directions, and that is always of interest to a novelist.

Ian McEwan

#18. I stopped being an engaged journalist and became a disengaged novelist.

Jim Crace

#19. Reading a newspaper is like reading someone's letters, as opposed to a biography or a history. The writer really does not know what will happen. A novelist needs to feel what that is like.

A.S. Byatt

#20. I'm a novelist, I'm not an activist. I'm not a non-fiction writer, I'm not a journalist. I'm not a foodie, I'm not even really an animal person, or an environmentalist. I did the best I could with this, but it's not who I am.

Jonathan Safran Foer

#21. I'm a novelist at heart. My sole intention is to write the best novel possible. I don't think about the film potential at all.

Nicholas Sparks

#22. There's a unique bond of trust between readers and authors that I don't believe exists in any other art form; as a reader, I trust a novelist to give me his or her best effort, however flawed.

Dan Simmons

#23. Ruth Cole was a novelist; novelists are not at their best when they go off half-cocked. She believed that she would prepare what she was going to tell the police - preferably in writing.

John Irving

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

Alfred Hitchcock

#25. 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.

George Pelecanos

#26. If you want to be a psychological novelist and write about human beings, the best thing you can do is keep a pair of cats.

Aldous Huxley

#27. I am a huge fan of Alan Furst. Furst is the best in the business
the most talented espionage novelist of our generation.

Vince Flynn

#28. Harriet laughed, remembering suddenly that a novelist owes a duty to her newspaper reporters.

Dorothy L. Sayers

#29. There is only one expert who is qualified to examine the souls and the life of a people and make a valuable report - the native novelist ... And when a thousand able novels have been written, there you have the soul of the people; and not anywhere else can these be had.

Mark Twain

#30. When Communism has been realized, everyone will be a novelist.

Mo Yan

#31. (The new boyfriend) knows I write every day for hours but has no idea that all I'm writing about is me. It seems wiser to let him think I'm an aspiring novelist instead of just an alcoholic with a year of sobriety who spends eight hours a day writing about the other 16.

Augusten Burroughs

#32. People have obsessions and fears and passions which they don't admit to. I think every character is interesting and has extremes. It's the novelist privilege to see how odd everyone is.

Iris Murdoch

#33. Read. Read as if your life depended on it because your life as a novelist does.

Louise Doughty

#34. Really there was no deadlier combination than bookworm and megalomaniac. It was, for example, the crazed condition of many novelists and travelers.

Paul Theroux

#35. I sometimes feel that my goal as a novelist would be to write a novel in which the language was so transparent that the reader would forget that language was the medium of understanding. Of course that's not possible, but it's some sort of idealized goal.

Paul Auster

#36. My temperament is not geared to that of a novelist.

Philip Levine

#37. A novel I read when I was about 17 or 18 - 'The World According to Garp,' by John Irving - really made me want to become a writer. The character of Garp is a novelist, and at the time, the whole lifestyle of being a writer was hugely appealing to me.

John Niven

#38. Through history it's the novelist who has felt affinity for the violent man who lives in the dark. Where are your sympathies? With the colonial police, the occupier, the rich landlord, the corrupt government, the militaristic state? Or with the terrorist?

Don DeLillo

#39. I know that books I have written will still resonate in 50 years - particularly 'My Sister's Keeper.' It has sold three million copies in the States alone. I strongly feel that, as a novelist, you have a platform and the ability to change people's minds.

Jodi Picoult

#40. I have from the first felt sure that the writer, when he sits down to commence his novel, should do so, not because he has to tell a story, but because he has a story to tell. The novelist's first novel will generally have sprung from the right cause.

Anthony Trollope

#41. Both the historian and the novelist view history as the struggle of a tiny minority, able and determined to make judgments, which is up against a vast and densely packed majority of the blind, who are led by their instincts and unable to think for themselves.

Lion Feuchtwanger

#42. The novelist, unlike many of his colleagues, makes up a number of word-masses roughly describing himself (roughly: niceties shallcome later), gives them names and sex, assigns them plausible gestures, and causes them to speak by the use of inverted commas, and perhaps to behave consistently.

E. M. Forster

#43. The novelist's obligation to remake the sensuous texture of a vanished world is also the historian's. The strongest fiction writers often do deep research to make the thought and utterances of lost time credible.

Simon Schama

#44. Film and novel characters are often stereotyped, but racial stereotyping in many novels or films creates & encourages labelling, discrimination & racism. ~Angelica Hopes

Angelica Hopes

#45. The difference between a novelist and someone who tinkers around with writing is this: novelists finish their books.

Nancy Etchemendy

#46. For years, I felt I was a novelist, but now I know I can write short fiction.

Jill McCorkle

#47. Every author these days is an award-winning novelist. Why? Because they set up an award contest and they dub themselves the winner.

Karen E. Quinones Miller

#48. A novelist has to know enough about a subject to fool the passenger next to him on an airplane.

David Foster Wallace

#49. Part of the desire to see each other succeed is to stop putting a price on success.

Crystal Evans

#50. 'The Secret Life of Bees' was my first novel, so I had no process. I was flying by the seat of my pants, as they say, trying to understand how I, as a novelist, would work with story.

Sue Monk Kidd

#51. Yes, but also one of the problems for a novelist in Ireland is the fact that there are no formal manners. I mean some people have beautiful manners but there's no kind of agreed form of manners.

John McGahern

#52. I've been a software engineer, a novelist, a journalist, and a manager - and managing developers is easily the trickiest thing I've ever done.

Jon Evans