Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Historian: an unsuccessful novelist.
I am a fictionalizing philosopher, not a novelist.
To be a novelist, all I need is a pen and a piece of paper.
Novel-writing is, for the novelist, a game of let's pretend.
I am a better novelist than a poet, playwright, or essayist.
The function of the novelist... is to comment upon life as he sees it.
That's the novelist's job: to peel back the layers and look underneath.
For years, I felt I was a novelist, but now I know I can write short fiction.
I don't really consider myself a novelist, it just came out purely by accident.
The historian will tell you what happened. The novelist will tell you what it felt like.
A filmmaker has almost the same freedom as a novelist has when he buys himself some paper.
The job of the novelist is to invent: to embroider, to color, to embellish, to make things up.
As a novelist, I tend to know significantly more about my characters than I do about my friends.
What is the difference between the novelist and the liar? At some moments, I have often wondered.
Faulkner was the first novelist I read with pen and paper in hand because his technique stunned me.
My paternal grandfather was a failed novelist. He stacked boxes of rejected manuscripts in a closet.
The novelist is the vestigial bone on the body cinema. We're like the little toe that can be cut off.
My mother's husband Harry Bloom was a writer, a novelist, a reporter, and an anti-apartheid activist.
I would love to see young writers come out of college and know there is a possibility to be a novelist.
I had a vision of myself as a novelist because that was where I could be serious. I couldn't with music.
A movie will do in one second, with one image, what it will take a novelist at least a page to describe.
I'm mostly a novelist these days, but I have written short stories in Fantasy, Science Fiction and horror.
Dostoevsky is such a bad writer it is hard to take him seriously as a novelist, though he is a wonderful philosopher.
Although some people think I am a romantic novelist I have always thought of myself as a rather gritty radical historian.
I was going to be the best failed novelist in Paris. That was certainly not the worst thing in the world that one could be.
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.
I saw myself as a writer, a novelist, even though I was living the life of a mother and housewife. Writing was - and is - what I do.
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.
The novelist has permission to do whatever she chooses to supercharge whatever's interesting in her story. This is also known as freedom.
You have to go out of your way as a suspense novelist to find situations where the protagonists are somewhat helpless and in real danger.
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.'
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.
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.
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.
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.
I was a frustrated musician, frustrated designer, frustrated art director, frustrated novelist, right. I'd fail at all these different professions.
The novelist, he's not a philosopher, not a technician of spoken language. He's someone who writes, above all, and through the novel asks questions.
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.
When I started out as a novelist, I thought I was going to be a private-eye writer. That was my intent, and that's what I studied, I mean, scholarly.
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.
In high school, I wanted to be an actress. Until I got to college and took some creative writing courses. Then I decided I wanted to become a novelist.
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.
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.
Back in the 1980s, when I was a lowly editorial assistant by day and trying to be a novelist by night, no god reigned so supreme as the god of literary prose.
The artist deals in what cannot be said in words. The artist whose medium is fiction does this in words. The novelist says in words what cannot be said in words.
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.
I think if I was interested in writing on my own, I would be a novelist - then you could write about yourself, and that would be it. You wouldn't need anyone else.
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.
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.
When finally I mustered the courage to tell a novelist friend that I was talking to editors about a biography, her reply was, 'Oh, that's okay. That's not a real book.'