Great Novelist Quotes

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

Francois Mauriac

#2. It is possible to be a great novelist - that is, to render a veracious account of your times - and a bad writer - that is, an incompetent practitioner of applied linguistics.

Angela Carter

#3. Essential characteristic of the really great novelist: a Christ-like, all-embracing compassion.

Arnold Bennett

#4. Where did the boy genius go? He had been, as a child, expected to be a neurosurgeon, or a great novelist. And now he's considering (or, okay, refusing to consider) law school. Was the burden of his potential too much for him?

Michael Cunningham

#5. A great novelist excels on the small scale and the large, the individual leaf and root as well as the forest; good fiction convinces us that the imaginary is real by selecting exactly the right detail and rendering it perfectly.

Laura Miller

#6. I've been wrestling with Kafka since I was an adolescent. I think he's a great aphorist, a great letter writer, a great diarist, a great short story writer, and a great novelist - I'd put novelist last.

John Banville

#7. The great novelist vibrated between two decanters with the regularity of a pendulum.

Louisa May Alcott

#8. Canada has one great novelist (Robertson Davies), which means it has one for every twenty-five million citizens - the world's highest ratio.

George Will

#9. 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.

Carolyn See

#10. No one looks at a baby and says, 'You are going to be a great novelist, and you really need to start writing now.' Something in us says: 'This is what I must do.'

Alice McDermott

#11. 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.

J.M. Coetzee

#12. A man can write one book that can be great, but this doesn't make him a great writer-just the writer of a great book ... I think a writer has to extend very widely, as well as plunge very deep, to be a great novelist.

Anthony Burgess

#13. When a novelist or screenwriter is looking for a subject, the element he's seeking is conflict. Conflict makes drama. Conflict produces great characters and memorable scenes. So war is a natural topic.

Steven Pressfield

#14. I have a ways to go as a novelist. But what's great is, well, I frankly enjoyed the solitude. And I enjoyed being able to tell characters what to say and do without negotiating with an actor.

Howard Gordon

#15. It is my contention that a really great novel is made with a knife and not a pen. A novelist must have the intestinal fortitude to cut out even the most brilliant passage so long as it doesn't advance the story.

Frank Yerby

#16. I was a novelist first. But in the mid-'80s, I did work in television for ten years. And yes, that was frequently the reaction to my scripts. People would say, 'You know, George, this is great. We love it, a terrific script, but it would cost five times our budget to shoot this.'

George R R Martin

#17. 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.

Daniel Suarez

#18. A book of great beauty and manically exquisite insight with a wild and deadly humor ... The only American novelist who may conceivably be possessed by genius.

Norman Mailer

#19. Perhaps then one reason why we have no great poet, novelist or critic writing today is that we refuse to allow words their liberty. We pin them down to one meaning, their useful meaning: the meaning which makes us catch the train, the meaning which makes us pass the examination.

Virginia Woolf

#20. Michel Houellebecq is the most interesting, provocative and important European novelist of my generation. Period. No one else comes close. He has written two or maybe three great books, and his latest, The Map and the Territory, is one of them.

Bret Easton Ellis

#21. Be born anywhere, little embryo novelist, but do not be born under the shadow of a great creed, not under the burden of original sin, not under the doom of Salvation.

Pearl S. Buck

#22. You know, my mom, who inspired me to be a novelist, I remember her reading 'The Agony and the Ecstasy,' about Michelangelo, and saying, 'No mother would want that for her child, no matter how great the artist.' I have my share of demons, but I am a gregarious sort.

Scott Turow

#23. I never thought I would become amazing. I never thought I would be as great as my father. I would like to continue writing novels, and hopefully, at some point, I would like to make the switch from being 'Stephen Hawking's daughter' to 'novelist Lucy Hawking,' and that will be a fabulous day.

Lucy Hawking

#24. I would never have been a novelist without working as a psychologist ... it was a great education in human nature.

Jonathan Kellerman

#25. The business of the novelist is not to relate great events, but to make small ones interesting.

Arthur Schopenhauer

#26. I was going to be a great woman novelist. Then the war came along and I think it's hard for young people today, don't you, to realize that when World War II happened we were dying to go and help our country.

Julia Child

#27. Naturally, it was easier for me to envision becoming a novelist than it is for most people. I had two great in-house teachers; I had parents who considered a career in the arts a real possibility rather than a dreamy arrow shot into the sky.

Jesse Kellerman

#28. Mark Twain was a great traveler and he wrote three or four great travel books. I wouldn't say that I'm a travel novelist but rather a novelist who travels - and who uses travel as a background for finding stories of places.

Paul Theroux

#29. 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!

Milan Kundera

#30. He had great respect for a novelist like James. Pound knew about the concentration of energies required to write novels and also knew that he did not have such qualities, that his inspirations came more in flashes than in sustained work. Writing prose was difficult,

John Tytell

#31. 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

#32. With a novelist's sense of drama and a historian's understanding of the social forces that shape our lives, Tom Gjelten has captured vividly
through the chronicle of a powerful family's fortunes
one of the great political dramas of our time.

Ronald Steel

#33. Farber had a huge effect on me as a writer. I don't mean I write like him. Farber is, first of all, a great stylist, a great writer. Anyone can read Manny Farber's film criticism, whether that person is a novelist, a poet, another critic, a historian, and learn a lot about writing by reading him.

Greil Marcus

#34. Noir is dead for me because historically, I think it's a simple view. I've taken it as far as it can go. I think I've expanded on it a great deal, taken it further than any other American novelist.

James Ellroy

#35. To call Clive Barker a 'horror novelist' would be like calling the Beatles a 'garage band' ... He is the great imaginer of our time. He knows not only our greatest fears, but also what delights us, what turns us on, and what is truly holy in the world. Haunting, bizarre, beautiful.

Quentin Tarantino

#36. Dickens' London was a place of the mind, but it was also a real place. Much of what we take today to be the marvellous imaginings of a visionary novelist turn out on inspection to be the reportage of a great observer.

Judith Flanders

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

Sophie Kinsella

#38. Only a great genius like the Victorian novelist Elizabeth Gaskell can be mother, wife and novelist without solitude. I couldn't write until my youngest child went to school, and then I began - the first morning - and I've never stopped.

Jane Gardam

#39. The most common human act that writing a novel resembles is lying. The working novelist lies daily, very complexly and at great length. If not for our excessive vanity and our over-active imaginations, novelists might be unusually difficult to deceive.

William Gibson

#40. For a novelist, the great thing about the Stone Age people is that we know virtually nothing about their beliefs - which means that I get to make it up! But it's still got to be plausible.

Michelle Paver

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

W. Somerset Maugham

#42. I'm a novelist: I spend a great part of my day pretending to myself that I'm in a different world, being a different person, faced with decisions I pretend I haven't created.

Nick Harkaway

#43. Writing is, by its nature, interior work. So being forced to be around people is a great gift for a novelist. You get to be reminded, daily, of how people think, how they speak, how they live; the things they worry about, the things they hope for, the things they fear.

Hanya Yanagihara

#44. Listening to these stories reminded me of the words of the great Ghanaian novelist Ayi Kwei Armah: For seasons and seasons and seasons, all our movement has been going against our self, a journey into our killer's desire.

Gloria Steinem

#45. Manners are of such great consequence to the novelist that any kind will do. Bad manners are better than no manners at all, and because we are losing our customary manners, we are probably overly conscious of them; this seems to be a condition that produces writers.

Flannery O'Connor

#46. A novelist must know what his last chapter is going to say and one way or another work toward that last chapter ... To me it is utterly basic, yet it seems like it's a great secret.

Leon Uris