Novelist Who Quotes

#1. 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

#2. (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

#3. 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

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

Nancy Etchemendy

#5. 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

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

Thane Rosenbaum

#8. In fact, though the books came slowly, he was a novelist to his bootlaces, an avid narrator who couldn't stop the story once it had started, who felt the terrors of existence so acutely that he had to tell them and tell them until he'd made them something else.

Joseph Heller

#9. 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.

Storm Jameson

#10. The businessman who is a novelist is able to drop in on literature and feel no suicidal loss of esteem if the lady is not at home, and he can spend his life preparing without fuss for the awful interview.

V.S. Pritchett

#11. A novelist is a person who lives in other people's skins.

E.L. Doctorow

#12. The only real people are the people who never existed, and if a novelist is base enough to go to life for his personages he should at least pretend that they are creations, and not boast of them as copies.

Oscar Wilde

#13. The novelist has more and more to say to readers who have less and less time to read: where to find the energy to engage a culture in crisis when the crisis consists in the impossibility of engaging with the culture?

Jonathan Franzen

#14. The first duty of the novelist is to entertain. It is a moral duty. People who read your books are sick, sad, traveling, in the hospital waiting room while someone is dying. Books are written by the alone for the alone.

Donna Tartt

#15. As novelist Harry Crews once wrote, I'm the kind of person who - if he can't have too much of something - doesn't want any of it. In

Mary Karr

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

Scott Spencer

#17. A novelist is essentially a person who covers distance through his patience, slowly, like an ant. A novelist impresses us not by his demonic and romantic vision, but by his patience.

Orhan Pamuk

#18. The suspense of a novel is not only in the reader, but in the novelist, who is intensely curious about what will happen to the hero.

Mary McCarthy

#19. I guess I would say that most of what I've learned about storytelling derives from novels and short stories. I cannot think of a novel or story, or a novelist or story writer, who thinks in terms of three-act structure.

Tom Bissell

#20. Just as a novelist may sometimes wonder why he invents characters who do not exist and makes them do things which do not matter, so a philosopher may wonder why he invents cases that cannot occur in order to determine what must be the case.

Edward St. Aubyn

#21. 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

#22. People lose it when I say this, but I'm a novelist who doesn't read novels. There are lots of good reasons for not reading novels! I'm also a game writer who doesn't play games - I keep everything very separate. The only crossover with me is comics. I write them, and I read them passionately.

Karen Traviss

#23. She is a tyrant much in the way of a bad novelist, who shapes his characters according to his own ideology or desires and never allows them the space to become themselves.

Azar Nafisi

#24. The past was where he lived most confidently, and with the surest sense of knowing who he was - not only as a novelist.

John Irving

#25. Lawrence Kelter is an exciting new novelist, who reminds me of an early Robert Ludlum.

Nelson DeMille

#26. I feel very strongly that where the facts exist, a historical novelist should use them if they're writing about a person who really lived, because a lot of people come to history through historical novels. I did. And a lot of people want their history that way.

Alison Weir

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

Jane Smiley

#28. My greatest fear is feeling like a professional novelist. Somebody who creates characters, who sits down and has pieces of paper taped to the wall - what's going to happen in this scene, or this act. What I like is for it to be a much more scary, sloppy reflection of who I am.

Jonathan Safran Foer

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

Douglas Kennedy

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

Georges Simenon

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

Brian Michael Bendis

#32. I am a born novelist, which does not happen all that often. There are people who try to write for a certain time, then they become Ministers of Culture under de Gaulle, and they begin living their own fictions.

Gore Vidal

#33. I'd like to be remembered as someone who used their ability as a novelist or as a dramatist to say the things he felt needed to be said about the society while being as entertaining as possible. Because if you don't entertain, nobody's listening.

Budd Schulberg

#34. It is fatal to know too much at the outcome: boredom comes as quickly to the traveler who knows his route as to the novelist who is over certain of his plot.

Paul Theroux

#35. The true novelist is one who understands the work as a continuous poem, is a myth-maker, and the wonder of the art resides in the endless different ways of telling a story.

Muriel Spark

#36. The novelist is more like a pregnant woman who delivers her own child unaided. A messy procedure, with lots of groaning.

David Mitchell

#37. A novelist is really nothing more than an historian of a people who have no history.

Federico Gamboa

#38. It's almost a blessing when we meet people who naturally want to do the sort of things that are in high demand in society. What a gift to do that, as opposed to other people who would say, 'I want to be a novelist but actually I have to be an accountant.'

Alain De Botton

#39. Who is better off? The one who writes to revel in the voluptuousness of the life that surrounds them? Or the one who writes to escape the tediousness of that which awaits them outside? Whose flame will last longer?

Roman Payne

#40. Some are sad to not yet have found mates, like Elliott Holt, a forty-year-old novelist who told me, 'I guess I just had no idea, could never have predicted, how intense the loneliness would be at this juncture of my life.

Rebecca Traister

#41. Thackeray is careful not to present a protagonist who is malevolently evil from birth; to trace a figure like this is unrewarding certainly to novelist and reader alike.

Martin J. Anisman

#42. If you don't trust a novelist, who are you going to trust?

Carlos Ruiz Zafon

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

A.S. Byatt

#44. I say novelist, not writer. The novelist is one who, according to Flaubert, seeks to disappear behind his work.

Milan Kundera

#45. Whatever fame a novelist my attain, it's always kind of an anonymous one. I can go anywhere, and no one knows who I am ...

Jonathan Kellerman

#46. No poet or novelist wishes he were the only one who ever lived, but most of them wish they were the only one alive, and quite a number fondly believe their wish has been granted.

W. H. Auden

#47. Those who are in the orbit, but nonetheless on the edges, can often be the real discoverers. It was why at times, the journalist, the historian and even the novelist paints the fullest picture of an era

Bob Woodward

#48. I don't have any delusions. I'm not a novelist - I'm a comedian who writes. I love doing the stand-up and the touring and the albums and all that, but it's pretty amazing to go into a library and see your book there.

Jim Gaffigan

#49. Dreadful is a poignant biography of a forgotten man who drank himself to death. It's a brilliant evocation of a self-hating gay novelist in the 1940s whom Gore Vidal once considered a rival.

Edmund White

#50. Novelist: A person who has more than a dozen novels in the works and thinks it would be novel to finish one.

Michael Kroft

#51. 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.

Stephen King

#52. The most important step in the whole process was to just sit down and do it. My hobby has become a second career. Who knew?-Jamie Beck, Romance Novelist

Holly Hurd

#53. Darling, in this family we don't call anyone a novelist who has not written more books than Jane Austen.

Pansy Schneider-Horst

#54. I'm a white, middle-class male who had a happy childhood in Ohio. The world does not need me to be a novelist.

David Quammen

#55. I'm a novelist who read a lot as a kid. When you grow up on books and then grow up to write books, famous authors are a lot more meaningful to you than TV and movie stars.

Claire Scovell LaZebnik

#56. 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

#57. I wish people would think of me as a musician who writes novels, instead of a novelist who writes music on the side.

Anthony Burgess

#58. A pornographic novelist is one who exploits the sexual instinct as a prostitute does. A legitimate sex novel elucidates it or brings out its poetry, tragedy, or comedy.

George Bernard Shaw

#59. It was probably Chekhov who said that the novelist is not someone who answers questions but someone who asks them.

Haruki Murakami

#60. It is the function of the novelist to reveal the hidden life at its source: to tell us more about Queen Victoria than could be known, and thus to produce a character who is not the Queen Victoria of history.

E. M. Forster

#61. Q: What literary complexities do you find most interesting? That is, what do you like most to "solve," so to speak, as a novelist?
A: One wishes to create characters who will speak directly to the minds of comparative literature professors and intelligent book reviewers.

Gilbert Sorrentino

#62. A novelist who ranks with Proust , Kafka , Musil and his friend James Joyce as one of the enduring pillars of Modernism.

Italo Svevo

#63. 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

#64. Not long ago, a novelist could believe he could have an effect on our consciousness of terror. Today, the men who shape and inflence human consciousness are the terrorists.

Don DeLillo

#65. The economy of a novelist is a little like that of a careful housewife who is unwilling to throw away anything that might perhaps serve its turn.

Graham Greene

#66. A novelist is an elephant, but an elephant who must pretend to forget.

Mary McCarthy

#67. A few were journalists and one a novelist, who wanted to get it right. (Rhyme welcomed his presence; he himself was the subject of a series of novels based on cases he'd run and had written the author on several occasions about misrepresentations of real crime scene work. "Must you sensationalize?")

Jeffery Deaver

#68. 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.

Vikas Swarup

#69. On Twitter, people who had read my book followed me and I could see what else they were reading, why they'd liked what I'd written and by the by, more about them than I'd ever elicit from two minutes in a tent at a book festival, stuck behind a signing desk.

Sara Sheridan

#70. A novelist is a doctor who sees only terminal cases.

John Irving

#71. I'm probably the only novelist who has ever written about political fugitives who actually knew a lot about them, had contact with them, and had a realistic notion of how they survived.

Marge Piercy

#72. I was one of those kids who never wanted to be anything but a novelist. And I don't know a lot of people who truly live the life that they dreamed of.

Scott Turow

#73. Without a doubt, I was born to want to make cinema, but the kind of cinema I want to make is not like commercial movies, which I enjoy myself, but I wanted to be the kind of filmmaker who wrote original work, sort of like a novelist would who deals with who we are and our times or our relationships.

Francis Ford Coppola

#74. It's hard for me to believe that a shy, bespectacled college graduate like Brad Meltzer who's a novelist and a father is a really setting out to be weirdly misogynistic.

Grant Morrison

#75. I started my career as an actor, then morphed into a playwright who accidentally became a novelist with my first book 'Fall On Your Knees.'

Ann-Marie MacDonald

#76. The question one asks of the young writer who wants to
know if he's got what it takes is this: "Is writing novels what
you want to do? Really want to do?"
If the young writer answers, "Yes," then all one can say is:
Do it. In fact, he will anyway.

John Gardner

#77. A novelist must wrestle with all mysteries and strangeness of life itself, and anyone who dies not wish to accept that grand, bone-chilling commission should write book reviews, editorials, or health-insurance policies instead.

Pat Conroy

#78. 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

#79. In effect I am not a novelist, but rather a failed essayist who started to write novels because he didn't know how to write essays.

Jose Saramago

#80. 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

#81. Happy is the novelist who manages to preserve an actual love letter that he received when he was young within a work of fiction, embedded in it like a clean bullet in flabby flesh and quite secure there, among spurious lives.

Vladimir Nabokov

#82. Say what you will about Queen Eleanor, she was a savvy, quick-witted woman who made her mark on history. And as the founder of the Courts of Love, what better patron monarch could there be for a romantic novelist?

Lauren Willig

#83. I think it's really boring, from the point of view of the novelist, to write about yourself. Tedious. But that's very hard to explain to people who really don't believe in the possibility of invention.

Peter Carey

#84. I am certain that a novelist is someone who attributes a different reality-value to the characters and events of his story than to those of 'real' life. A novelist is someone who confuses his own life with that of his characters.

Alain Robbe-Grillet

#85. I never met anybody in my life who says, I want to be a critic. People want to be a fireman, poet, novelist.

Leslie Fiedler

#86. A novelist who has to defend his creation by telling a reader *But that's what really happened*, is a novelist who has failed.

Samuel G. Freedman

#87. There are two ways to look at my publishing career. One is that I'm a novelist churning out books, who is eight into a series; the other way is that I'm a cartoonist, just starting out. Most cartoonists have long careers: Charles Schulz drew Peanuts for 50 years.

Jeff Kinney

#88. A cynic once told G. K. Chesterton, the British novelist and essayist, "Blessed is he who expecteth nothing, for he shall not be disappointed." Chesterton's rejoinder? "Blessed is he who expecteth nothing, for he shall enjoy everything.

Benjamin Graham

#89. I was always at heart a novelist and wanted to tell a bigger story, so I wanted to create people who told other kinds of truths than literal truths.

Aminatta Forna

#90. A novelist who writes nothing for 10 years finds his reputation rising. Because I keep on producing books they say there must be something wrong with this fellow.

J.B. Priestley