Quotes About Novelist

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

Mo Yan

#3. (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

#4. 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

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

Louise Doughty

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

Paul Theroux

#7. 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

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

Philip Levine

#9. 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

#10. 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

#11. 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

#12. 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

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

Dorothy L. Sayers

#14. 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

#15. 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

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

Angelica Hopes

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

Nancy Etchemendy

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

Jill McCorkle

#19. 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

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

David Foster Wallace

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

Crystal Evans

#22. '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

#23. 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

#24. 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

#25. 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

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

John Barth

#27. Freud was just a novelist.

Peter Ackroyd

#28. 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

#29. 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

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

Jonathan Stroud

#31. 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

#32. 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

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

Thane Rosenbaum

#34. 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

#35. 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

#36. 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

#37. 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

#38. 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

#39. 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

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

Jim Crace

#41. 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

#42. I always wanted to be a writer, and I did want to be a novelist. In college I took a couple of classes that taught me I would never be a novelist. I discovered I had no imagination. My short stories were always thinly veiled memoir.

Anne Fadiman

#43. I could see now that a literary education did not fit one for the popular novelist's trade.Once you had started using words like flavicomous or acroamatic, because you liked the sound of them, you were lost.

Woodrow Wilson

#44. A poet or novelist will invent interruptions to avoid long consecutive days at the ordained page; and of these the most pernicious are other kinds of writing
articles, lectures, reviews, a wide correspondence.

Shirley Hazzard

#45. I love novels, but I'm not a novelist. I'm just a dramatist, which means I write lines for actors. That's all I have ever wanted to do.

John Logan

#46. She'll be an excellent novelist: a monster of self-absorption.

Lan Samantha Chang

#47. 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

#48. 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

#49. I think that's the most important job of a novelist - to bring authority to their writing.

Maria Semple

#50. I think that if the novel's task is to describe where we find ourselves and how we live now, the novelist must take a good, hard look at the most central facts of contemporary life - technology and science.

Richard Powers

#51. Lie through your teeth and call it a novel. All will be well.

James R. Paddock

#52. I had a vision of myself as a novelist because that was where I could be serious. I couldn't with music.

Peter Hammill

#53. As a novelist, you could say that I am dreaming while I am awake, and every day I can continue with yesterday's dream. Because it is a dream, there are so many contradictions and I have to adjust them to make the story work. But, in principle, the original dream does not change.

Haruki Murakami

#54. I write about life as it exists within houses and on the streets. And there's nothing, hopefully, in any of my characterizations or in any of my plottings or in any of my valuations that doesn't ring true to life. I'm a novelist. I'm not a theoretician.

Richard Grossman

#55. The novelist does not long to see the
lion eat grass. He realizes that one and
the same God created the wolf and the
lamb, then smiled, "seeing that his
work was good."

Andre Gide

#56. The historian will tell you what happened. The novelist will tell you what it felt like.

E.L. Doctorow

#57. The fact is that in this day and age I don't think any novelist can assume that a book will get attention.

Curtis Sittenfeld

#58. It is not the office of a novelist to show us how to behave ourselves; it is not the business of fiction to teach us anything.

Agnes Repplier

#59. For a novelist, a given historic situation is an anthropologic laboratory in which he explores his basic question: What is human existence?

Milan Kundera

#60. The bad novelist constructs his characters; he directs them and makes them speak. The true novelist listens to them and watches them act; he hears their voices even before he knows them.

Andre Gide

#61. 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

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

E.L. Doctorow

#63. The novelist is required to open his eyes on the world around him and look. If what he sees is not highly edifying, he is still required to look. Then he is required to reproduce, with words, what he sees.

Flannery O'Connor

#64. While victors may get to write history, novelists get to write/right reality.

M.T. Bass

#65. I'm a natural novelist. I'm interested in the person and the group, and how they mesh. And one of the ways I don't want them to mesh is for the person to be subsumed into the group.

Jane Smiley

#66. The Novelist, afraid his ideas may be foolish, slyly puts them in the mouth of some other fool and reserves the right to disavow them.

Diane Johnson

#67. A novelist's characters must be with him as he lies down to sleep, and as he wakes from his dreams. He must learn to hate them and to love them.

Anthony Trollope

#68. 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

#69. What description of clouds and sunsets was to the old novelist, description of scientific apparatus and methods is to the modern Scientific Detective writer.

Hugo Gernsback

#70. I never see a novel as a film while I'm writing it. Mostly because novels and films are so different, and I'm such an internal novelist.

Alice Hoffman

#71. 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

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

Vita Sackville-West

#73. 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

#74. It's impossible for me to disentangle how much of my storytelling urge is the product of growing up with novelist parents and how much is a genetic legacy from those same parents.

Jesse Kellerman

#75. 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

#76. 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

#77. A risk for a poet-novelist is imbalance: The poems can flatten into prose or lose their intensity of focus; the novels can stall amid lofty writing or literary preciousness and ignore the engine of plot and character.

Floyd Skloot

#78. As you write your novel, you gradually start thinking like some of your characters in it. And at times the writer may lose himself completely in some character.

Avijeet Das

#79. To capture the human cost of fallen empire with all its horror and absurdity, Sheets offers the right combination: the political insight of a top reporter and the power of a novelist.

Martin Cruz Smith

#80. Ask me anything!
I'm a novelist.
What I don't know, I make up!

J. Thomas Steele

#81. Novelist by day; screenwriter by night.

A.D. Posey

#82. Now that I was a novelist, I could not face the ignominy of failing to produce novels.

Thomas Keneally

#83. Liberty of imagination should be the most precious possession of a novelist. To try voluntarily to discover the fettering dogmas of its own inspiration, is a trick worthy of humna perverseness which, after inventing an absurdity, endeavours to find for it a pedigree of distinguished ancestors ...

Joseph Conrad

#84. I became a novelist because of 'Gone With the Wind,' or more precisely, my mother raised me up to be a 'Southern' novelist, with a strong emphasis on the word 'Southern' because 'Gone With the Wind' set my mother's imagination ablaze when she was a young girl growing up in Atlanta.

Pat Conroy

#85. As a historical novelist, there is very little I like more than spending time sorting through boxes of old letters, diaries, maps, trinkets, and baubles.

Sara Sheridan

#86. If the novelist shares his or her problems with the characters, he or she is able to study his personal unconscious.

Manuel Puig

#87. 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

#88. In the compact between novelist and reader, the novelist promises to lie, and the reader promises to allow it.

Cynthia Ozick

#89. As a novelist, I'm endlessly fascinated by human behavior and interactions.

Juliet Marillier

#90. Speaking as a novelist myself, I know that members of our profession live in our imaginations as much or more as we inhabit what people call 'the real world' ...

Dan Simmons

#91. Being a novelist is hard for anyone - male or female. You don't get to quit your day job.

Jennifer Weiner

#92. A chronic invalid has but one thought about his identity: He doesn't want to be a sick man. The rest of the discussion seems frivolous to him-an immense privilege of the healthy. Still, I'm a novelist, and so I pursue it.

Nancy Horan

#93. I started my career as a novelist. 'Veronica Mars' was first imagined as a novel.

Rob Thomas

#94. 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

#95. 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

#96. You write once and you can call yourself a writer, but it takes three novels before you can call yourself a novelist. The first two could have just been lucky. One day, I will finish my third, and one day, I will be a novelist.

Michael Kroft

#97. If you hear voices, you're a lunatic. If you write down what they say, you're an author.

Dani Harper

#98. The novelist screws up his courage in order to invest another two or three years in another attempt to float a boat of original design upon an invented ocean.

Edward Hoagland

#99. I think that at the bottom of all art lies the impulse to preserve.

Philip Larkin

#100. To ask a novelist to talk about his novels is like asking somebody to cook about their dancing.

Jim Crace