Quotes About Novelist

#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. I think having a coach or an editor or whatever the novelist's producer is could help. If you finish a chapter and you turn it in to him, and he or she said, "That was pretty good, it might go better." Maybe that's what I'll try to find.

Craig Finn

#3. Sometimes writing a novel is not unlike having a baby. You'd have to ask a female novelist to compare the pain.

Salman Rushdie

#4. 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

#5. 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

#6. Novels are fictions and therefore they tell lies, but through those lies every novelist attempts to tell the truth about the world.

Paul Auster

#7. Novelist and poet David Huddle is a quiet but fabulous writer, and he does adolescent longing better than anyone I know.

Rebecca Makkai

#8. A Christian novelist tries to describe the world as it is.

John Updike

#9. I probably would have gone the M.F.A. route except I was a dad at 19, and it made more sense to go to work for a newspaper and support a kid that way. But the funny thing is, that detour became the most important step in my developing as a novelist.

Jess Walter

#10. I like to think of myself as an unmediated novelist - or perhaps a national novelist.

E.L. Doctorow

#11. If a novelist tells you something she knows or thinks, and you believe her, that is not because either of you think she is God, but because she is doing her work - as a novelist.

A.S. Byatt

#12. I want Tom Clancy, the Maryland novelist, to write the story of the rest of my life.

Christopher Buckley

#13. It is the job of the novelist to touch the reader.

Elizabeth George

#14. The greatest benefit we owe to the artist, whether painter, poet, or novelist, is the extension of our sympathies ... Art is the nearest thing to life; it is a mode of amplifying experience and extending our contact with our fellow-men beyond the bounds of our personal lot.

George Eliot

#15. As a child I was an inveterate liar. As opposed to now, I am a Novelist.

John Green

#16. Our remedies oft in ourselves do lie Which we ascribe to heaven; the fated sky Gives us free scope; and only backward pulls Our slow designs when we ourselves are dull. How much I could do if I only tried. * (1803-1873) English dramatist, novelist, and politician.

Napoleon Hill

#17. Trying to outrun the novelist's most insidious enemy, which is doubt.

Stephen King

#18. With a novelist, like a surgeon, you have to get a feeling that you've fallen into good hands - someone from whom you can accept the anesthetic with confidence.

Saul Bellow

#19. 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

#20. The pull of history has been a strong theme in my life as a novelist.

Anita Shreve

#21. Yes, one uses what one knows, but autobiography means something else. I should never be able to write a real autobiography; I always end by falsifying and fictionalizing - I'm a liar, in fact. That means I'm a novelist, after all. I write about what I know.

Alberto Moravia

#22. More than anything I am a novelist. But for me, an author's job is not only to create linguistically accomplished works. As an author I also want to stimulate discussion.

Orhan Pamuk

#23. But the fellow talked like a cheap novelist. - Or like a very good novelist for the matter of that, if it's the business of a novelist to make you see things clearly.

Ford Madox Ford

#24. One more recent novelist to come along is Cormac McCarthy. Him, I like.

Leslie Fiedler

#25. I tried to make guitars that were close to what my heroes played. That's the way it's done. My experience is that you have to do it like a musician. You have to learn the language before you can learn to be a novelist.

Paul Reed Smith

#26. As a poet or a novelist or a painter, you are pushing yourself all the time, always looking for a new way to approach something, challenging yourself and never, never trying to write the same book twice.

Paul Auster

#27. The novelist can't successfully depict such horrifying reality. But she can, and must, try, to bear witness. There are many ways of doing this; the mode I prefer is indirect.

Teju Cole

#28. I get work because I'm primarily a novelist but I've become script doctor. I can work back and forth between French and English.

Norman Spinrad

#29. I have that special sort of novelist body of knowledge which is extraordinarily wide and very, very shallow. So I can usually answer the questions on 'Jeopardy,' but never the bonus question.

Christopher Moore

#30. 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

#31. If you are a novelist of a certain type of temperament, then what you really want to do is re-invent the world. God wasn't too bad a novelist, except he was a Realist.

John Barth

#32. Well I'm not a novelist. I've only written one book and that is a memoir.

Carly Fiorina

#33. A movie will do in one second, with one image, what it will take a novelist at least a page to describe.

Yann Martel

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

Italo Svevo

#35. Naturally a direct comparison of terrorist and novelist is complete nonsense. But there was once a time when the novelist also had some influence on how his contemporaries thought, the way they saw the world, the way they lived.

Don DeLillo

#36. As a novelist, you have to be free. Books can't be an act of filial duty.

Richard Flanagan

#37. I don't know if a novelist ever fully detaches him- or herself from what they wrote and the way they wrote it. I can watch 'Presumed Innocent' again and again, and I will always be bothered by the same things that will never bother anybody else.

Scott Turow

#38. All my siblings became artists. One's a novelist, my brother is a painter, my sister was a costume designer.

Caio Fonseca

#39. I don't want to marry anybody, but I certainly wouldn't want to marry a bad novelist.

Ruth Rendell

#40. Being a novelist and being a mother have exactly coincided in my life: the call from my agent saying that I had a contract for my first novel - that was on my answering phone message when I got back from the hospital with my first child.

Barbara Kingsolver

#41. To become a novelist, the most crucial thing one must do is read, read and read again - gradually you begin to think like a writer. Ideas are not found - they are shaped.

Avi

#42. I consider myself foremost a novelist with the intent of crafting stories that people will remember.

Nicholas Sparks

#43. Before I became a suspense novelist, I wrote romantic suspense as Alicia Scott.

Lisa Gardner

#44. Memory,' wrote the Lebanese novelist Elias Khoury, is a process of organizing what to forget.

Ben Ehrenreich

#45. The novelist, quite rightly, fears the psychoanalyst as both an enemy and a usurper.

Will Self

#46. Radcliffe is the first important English novelist to use poetic epigraphs, interpolated poems, and poetic fragments decoratively, as it were, for their suggestive or mood-enhancing effects. (Matthew

Ann Radcliffe

#47. It is less the business of the novelist to tell us what happened than to show how it happened.

V.S. Pritchett

#48. 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

#49. 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

#50. VARANASI TRAFFIC is shambolic. It's a humbling reminder that the British drive on the left side of the road and we (Indians) drive on what's left of the road. "The traffic is not terrible at all," wrote novelist Geoff Dyer. "It is beyond any idea of terribleness. It is beyond any idea of traffic.

Guru Madhavan

#51. 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

#52. Before you have children, the novelist Fay Weldon once said, you can believe you are a nice person: after you have children you understand how wars start.

Adam Phillips

#53. The business of the poet and the novelist is to show the sorriness underlying the grandest things and the grandeur underlying the sorriest things.

Thomas Hardy

#54. Perhaps a novelist has a greater ability to forget than other men
he has to forget or become sterile. What he forgets is the compost of the imagination.

Graham Greene

#55. As a novelist, I have a somewhat higher soapbox to stand on than most people do when it comes to talking back to the merchants of fear.

L. Neil Smith

#56. I'm a big, bombastic novelist and thrill-ride guy. I'm never going to win the National Book Award.

Seth Grahame-Smith

#57. Art is for [the Irish] inseparable from artifice: of that, the theatre is the home. Possibly, it was England made me a novelist.

Elizabeth Bowen

#58. So much of a novelist's writing ... takes place in the unconscious: in those depths the last word is written before the word appears on paper. We remember the details of our story, we do not invent them.

Graham Greene

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

Haruki Murakami

#60. I put it to you that there are no British poets, there are no British novelists. I have heard myself described as one, but I think really I'm an English novelist; there are Scottish poets and Scottish novelists.

Ian McEwan

#61. 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

#62. I don't think I'm a natural novelist. Plot is definitely one of my weaker points. I've been working on it a long time, and it's not getting much better.

Rick Bass

#63. So, I guess motherhood and the threat of not being able to pay my rent inspired me to be a novelist. But as far as what inspired me to be a writer, it's the stories. It sounds very cliched, but the stories rise up and demand to be told. They always have done, long before I became a writer.

Gayle Forman

#64. The only way to be a novelist, to think that you can create something others will give themselves up to for a dozen hours or more, is to have psychotic self-belief.

Nicola Griffith

#65. My role as a novelist is to explore ideas and imagination, and hopefully that will inspire people from my world to continue dreaming and to believe in dreams.

Alexis Wright

#66. I'm not imprisoned in any one medium. In films I use techniques that are not necessarily what other directors attempt. When I write novels I also use techniques which can run counter to those that a novelist would use.

Philippe Claudel

#67. I'm a novelist first, and I wrote a bunch of books, and everything I write, I just find people are more interesting when there's an element of humor to it.

Jonathan Tropper

#68. I'm a novelist, editor, short story writer. I also teach, and I freelance sometimes as an arts consultant. Most of my books have been published by Warner Books, now known as Grand Central Books.

Nalo Hopkinson

#69. Eighty-five per cent of what goes on in a novelist's head is none of his business,

Stephen King

#70. I hate this word 'graphic novel.' It is a term publishing houses have created for the bourgeois so they wouldn't be ashamed of buying comics ... I'm not a graphic novelist. I am a cartoonist and I make comics and I am very happy about it.

Marjane Satrapi

#71. I have tried very hard as a novelist to say, 'Novels are about individuals and especially larger than life individuals.'

Bharati Mukherjee

#72. I don't think any novelist should be concerned with literature ... literature should be left to essayists.

Jacqueline Susann

#73. In America they have to know just what you are
novelist, poet, playwright ... Well, I've been all of them ... I think poems and novels and stories spring from the same seed. It's not like, say, playing polo and knitting.

Robert Penn Warren

#74. Life is a very bad novelist. It is chaotic and ludicrous.

Javier Marias

#75. I studied the short story as part of my creative writing course at university but then set off as a novelist. Generally, there is a sense that even if you want to write short stories, you need to do a novel first.

Sarah Hall

#76. 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

#77. The novel, for me, was an accident. I really don't consider myself a novelist.

Wole Soyinka

#78. I'm a novelist. I'm not a crusader, and I'm not an editorial writer. And I'm not writing fiction to convince anybody of anything.

Alice McDermott

#79. 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

#80. Edinburgh is a comfortable puddle for a novelist.

Sara Sheridan

#81. A good novelist does not lead his characters, he follows them. A good novelist does not create events, he watches them happen and then writes down what he sees.

Stephen King

#82. The novelist helps us to see things we might not notice otherwise.

Madeleine L'Engle

#83. 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

#84. As a novelist, I remain interested in the notion of a single reckless act and its consequences.

Anita Shreve

#85. 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

#86. that means your father's the novelist, Hiraku Makimura?

Haruki Murakami

#87. An obscure flesh-and-blood Gascon, forgotten by History, transformed into a legendary giant by the novelist's genius

Arturo Perez-Reverte

#88. To present a scientific subject in an attractive and stimulating manner is an artistic task, similar to that of a novelist or even a dramatic writer. The same holds for writing textbooks.

Max Born

#89. The trick to being a novelist is to act like an iceberg. Make it seem as if you're displaying only one-tenth of what you know, and the other nine-tenths isn't visible and never mind if that part is pure styrofoam!

Vikram Seth

#90. I don't get involved in casting, budgets, location or promotion. Just the script. And, of course, the promotional tour. Which is fine with me - I'm a novelist.

Nicholas Sparks

#91. Every 'Observer' writer wants to be a novelist.

Jared Kushner

#92. You learn different things through fiction. Historians are always making a plot about how certain things came to happen. Whereas a novelist looks at tiny little things and builds up a sort of map, like a painting, so that you see the shapes of things.

A.S. Byatt

#93. Henry James claim that if you want to be a novelist you should be somebody on whom nothing is lost.

Ben Lerner

#94. 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

#95. More people thought I was strange because I was a teenage novelist, not because I was from Oklahoma. That's where I got the looks like I was from the zoo.

S.E. Hinton

#96. The novelist must ground his work in faithful study of human nature.

Goldwin Smith

#97. Being a novelist is the adult version of a kid creating a make-believe world. But unlike a child, a writer of fiction has to come up with a structured story, one that has as much meaning for others as it has for her.

Susan Isaacs

#98. 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

#99. My first editor used to say that eighty-five per cent of what goes on in a novelist's head is none of his business, a sentiment I've never believed should be restricted to just writers.

Stephen King

#100. My affinity, as a novelist, with Dickens has been overstated. I relish the way everything in his prose pulsates with life force, and I'm in debt to him every time I invest inanimate objects with uncanny animism. But his female characters annoy me.

Michel Faber