Novelist Quotes

It's like a novelist writing far out things.

If it makes a point and makes sense, then people like to read that. But if it's off in left field and goes over the edge, you lose it. The same with musical talent, I think.

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

If a person is not talented enough to be a novelist, not smart enough to be a lawyer, and his hands are too shaky to perform operations, he becomes a journalist.

They can't yank a novelist like they can a pitcher.

A novelist has to go the full nine, even if it kills him.

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.

Historian -- an unsuccessful novelist.

There never was a good biography of a good novelist.

There couldn't be. He is too many people, if he's any good.

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.

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.

A novelist is, like all mortals, more fully at home on the surface of the present than in the ooze of the past.

I was an only child. I lost both my parents. By the time I was twenty I was bald. I'm homosexual. In the way of circumstances and background to transcend I had everything an artist could possibly want. It was practically a blueprint. I was programmed to be a novelist or a playwright. But I'm not.

Novelists are perhaps the last people in the world to be entrusted with opinions. The nature of a novel is that it has no opinions, only the dialectic of contrary views, some of which, all of which, may be untenable and even silly. A novelist should not be too intelligent either, although he may be permitted to be an intellectual.

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.

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

It is not the first duty of the novelist to provide blueprints for insurrection, or uplifting tales of successful resistance for the benefit of the opposition. The naming of what is there is what is important.

By measuring individual human worth, the novelist reveals the full enormity of the State

According to my sister, the expert novelist Jackie Collins, most men stray.

And sex doesn't mean anything to most men. But I wouldn't date a man who slept around. Absolutely not. I've divorced people for that.

The dominant and most deep-dyed trait of the journalist is his timorousness.

Where the novelist fearlessly plunges into the water of self-exposure, the journalist stands trembling on the shore in his beach robe. The journalist confines himself to the clean, gentlemanly work of exposing the grieves and shames of others.

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.

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.

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.

With the marketing pressures driving the book world today, it's much easier to get the author of a memoir on a television show than a serious novelist.

Sigmund Freud was a novelist with a scientific background.

He just didn't know he was a novelist. All those damn psychiatrists after him, they didn't know he was a novelist either.

Personally, I have never wished I were a male novelist.

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

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.

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.

A filmmaker has almost the same freedom as a novelist has when he buys himself some paper.

Every novelist has a different purpose - and often several purposes which might even be contradictory.

As a novelist, I tell stories and people give me money.

Then financial planners tell me stories and I give them money.

I wanted nothing less than to be a fiction writer when I was a kid.

If you had told me I would be an artist or novelist when I grew up, I would have laughed in your face.

A playwright must be his own audience.

A novelist may lose his readers for a few pages; a playwright never dares lose his audience for a minute.

The function of the novelist... is to comment upon life as he sees it.

Well, to be honest I think I'm a better short story writer than a novelist.

Novels I find very hard, hours and hours, weeks and weeks, of conscious thought - whereas short stories slip out painlessly in a few days.

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

Dostoevski does not tell you what to think about his legend, but he requires that you think about it. The novelist was a deeply religious man and he always thought many readers missed that point about him.

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

God pity the poor novelist.

The Catholic novelist in the South will see many distorted images of Christ, but he will certainly feel that a distorted image of Christ is better than no image at all. I think he will feel a good deal more kinship with backwoods prophets and shouting fundamentalists than he will with those politer elements for whom the supernatural is an embarrassment and for whom religion has become a department of sociology or culture or personality development.

I started writing because of a terrible feeling of powerlessness, the novelist Anita Brookner has said. The National Book Award winner Alice McDermott noted that the most difficult thing about becoming a writer was convincing herself that she had anything to say that people would want to read. There's nothing to writing, the columnist Red Smith once commented. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and open a vein.

When I'm writing a novel, I'm dealing with a double life.

I live in the present at the same time that I live in the past with my characters. It is this that makes a novelist so eccentric and unpleasant.

I don't like to read novels where the novelist tells me what to think about the situation and the characters. I prefer to discover for myself.

My temperament is not geared to that of a novelist.

Let's put it this way: if you are a novelist, I think you start out with a 20 word idea, and you work at it and you wind up with a 200,000 word novel. We, picture-book people, or at least I, start out with 200,000 words and I reduce it to 20.

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.

In order for a long piece of work to engage a novelist over an extended period of time, it has to deal with questions that you find very important, that you're trying to work out.

I believe, in a funny way, the job of the novelist is to be out there on the fringes and speaking for an experience that has not really been spoken for.

The job of the novelist is to invent: to embroider, to color, to embellish, to make things up.

So, how to stay inside the world of entertainment without actually getting another job? I felt the only logical answer was to become a novelist. So I wrote the first book - driven by some very real feelings of desperation - and it worked.

After I convinced them that I was a harmless novelist, I actually got them to give me a tour of the harem - which is usually off limits for tourists.