Novelists Life Quotes

#1. I'm a novelist, and idle speculation is what novelists do. How odd to spend one's life trying to pretend that non-existent people are real: though no odder, I suppose, than what government bureaucrats do, which is trying to pretend that real people are non-existent.

Margaret Atwood

#2. If you tell a novelist, 'Life's not like that', he has to do something about it. The poet simply replies, 'No, but I am.'

Philip Larkin

#3. I cannot and do not live in the world of discretion, not as a writer, anyway. I would prefer to, I assure you - it would make life easier. But discretion is, unfortunately, not for novelists.

Philip Roth

#4. Well I certainly have learned and I hope I'm moving on and certainly two years of prison was a terrible punishment.

Jeffrey Archer

#5. 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

#6. A novelist has mad a fictional representation of life. I doing so, he has revealed to us more significance, it may be, than he could find in life itself.

Bernard DeVoto

#7. For me, to catch, to celebrate the reality and life and friends and everything around me the very moment it happens - that's what is, that's what I'm possessed by.

Jonas Mekas

#8. The novelist is condemned to wander all his life. Homeless and blind like Oedipus he wanders until death. And so let us protect the novelist and adore him, with pity, honor, and love.

Roman Payne

#9. Her eyes don't leave her book, but I see her smile. It's like the inside of my chest hiccups or something at the sight.

Nyrae Dawn

#10. ...though it was too true that life as she is lived has a way of being curiously different from life as described by novelists.

Stella Gibbons

#11. If you ask a twenty-one-year-old poet whose poetry he likes, he might say, unblushing, "Nobody's," In his youth, he has not yet understood that poets like poetry, and novelists like novels; he himself likes only the role, the thought of himself in a hat.

Annie Dillard

#12. I cling to the basic set of tenets laid out in Tom Wolfe's 'New Journalism' - to get out there like the great French novelists of the 19th century and study life. I am a Tom Wolfe fan of the first order.

Peter York

#13. People in a novel can be understood completely by the reader, if the novelist can be understood completely by the reader, if the novelist wishes; their inner as well as their outer life can be exposed.

E. M. Forster

#14. Flora sighed. It was curious that persons who lived what the novelists called a rich emotional life always seemed to be a bit slow on the uptake.

Stella Gibbons

#15. The novelist uses facts to create a fiction about life. The pornographer uses sexual reality to create sexual illusion.

Marty Rubin

#16. last section), we can solve the equation by eliminating the fractions. We can accomplish this by
multiplying each term of the equation

Donny Brusca

#17. Travel does what good novelists also do to the life of everyday, placing it like a picture in a frame or a gem in its setting, so that the intrinsic qualities are made more clear. Travel does this with the very stuff that everyday life is made of, giving to it the sharp contour and meaning of art.

Freya Stark

#18. All novelists I speak to about how they started usually say it was by pulling up their roots and going to live somewhere else. You see the shape of your life at a distance.

Deborah Moggach

#19. People really want to believe that there is no fiction. I think they find it much easier to imagine that novelists are writing memoirs, writing about their lives, because it's difficult to conceive that there's a great imaginary life in which you can participate.

Mark Leyner

#20. If you really want to feel the life, use not your umbrella! Touch the truth directly!

Mehmet Murat Ildan

#21. Always seek for balance in your life: If you stayed long in the darkness, walk long in the light; if you talked too much, stay silent for a good while; if you climbed the high mountains, hike long on the plains! Balance everything!

Mehmet Murat Ildan

#22. I am persuaded that not a novel in ten thousand is of any use to a child to fit him for life. The most are of use only to unfit him
to blunt his senses and infect him with the writers' poor silly sentiments. Nine out of ten novelists deserve to be prosecuted under an Adulterated Emotions Act.

Storm Jameson

#23. 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

#24. Don't ever fret over married children; they will take care of themselves.

Nachman Of Breslov

#25. Unfortunately for novelists, real life is getting way too funny and far-fetched.

Carl Hiaasen

#26. Radium, discovered by Marie and Pierre Curie in 1898, was especially popular: the 'it' element of its day. Radium glows an eerie blue-green in the dark, giving off light for years without any apparent power source. People had never seen anything like it.

Sam Kean