Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
That is the dream of all novelists-that one of their characters will become 'somebody.'
For you was I born, for you do I have life, for you will I die, for you am I now dying.
You know what they say: When people start burning books they'll soon burn human beings.
I'm a novelist at heart. How's that? And that's how I make my living, is I write novels.
By measuring individual human worth, the novelist reveals the full enormity of the State
I think of a designer as a processor of information — like a scriptwriter or a novelist.
The historian will tell you what happened. The novelist will tell you what it felt like.
I only became a novelist because I thought I had missed my chance to become a historian.
Just as the painter thinks with his brush and paints the novelist thinks with his story.
Being a novelist is hard for anyone - male or female. You don't get to quit your day job.
Not all popular novelists are good, but all good novelists are, sooner or later, popular.
As a novelist, I ask of myself only that I tell the truth and that I tell it beautifully.
I was writing from the time I was 12 years old, but I originally wanted to be a novelist.
I started writing short fiction very briefly, as I imagine is the case for some novelists.
A filmmaker has almost the same freedom as a novelist has when he buys himself some paper.
A woman filled with faith in the one she loves is the creation of a novelist's imagination.
It would be wrong to refuse to face the fact that everything is fundamentally sick and sad.
Just for the record, she still loves you. She wouldn't bother to torture you if she didn't.
I'm a very old-fashioned novelist. I write 19th-century novels, where a lot of rules apply.
Novelists have to love humanity to write anything worthwhile. Poets have to love themselves.
Southerners make good novelists: they have so many stories because they have so much family.
I'm a novelist. I think fiction is important or I wouldn't be doing it, but most of it's bad.
A novelist is on the cusp between someone who knows everything and someone who knows nothing.
The next time the novelist rings the bell I will not stir though the meeting-house burn down.
Novelists can ask - they can ask for anything - but their books are their answers in advance.
We crime novelists have a great pulpit. We write about justice and about correcting injustice.
A novelist is someone who sits around the house all day in his underwear, trying not to smoke.
America may have great poets and novelists, but she never will have more than one necromancer.
While the novelist is banging on his typewriter, the poet is watching a fly in the windowpane.
It always takes two. For relationships to work, for them to break apart, for them to be fixed.
I try very hard to be fair, and I look for ironies. In a way, I live on ironies as a novelist.
It is less the business of the novelist to tell us what happened than to show how it happened.
The business of the novelist is not to relate great events, but to make small ones interesting.
Do remember, though, that sometimes the people you oppress become mightier than you would like.
A novelist has to know enough about a subject to fool the passenger next to him on an airplane.
To ask a novelist to talk about his novels is like asking somebody to cook about their dancing.
Was our life nothing more than a sequence of anonymous screams in a desert of indifferent stars?
I realized that my identity as a novelist was private. Only I knew how much of a novelist I was!
My job as the novelist is to present the whole case, then the reader gets to render her verdict.
Most novelists are narcissistic egomaniacs who would probably fit somewhere on the CEO spectrum.
... the novelist is bound by the reasonable possibilities, not the probabilities, of his culture.
Miss Austen had shown the infinite possibilities of ordinary and present things for the novelist.
I have a wonderful editor who believes in fiction and poetry. She herself is a novelist and poet.
If you only write when inspired, you may be a fairly decent poet, but you'll never be a novelist.
Proust was the greatest novelist of the twentieth century, just as Tolstoy was in the nineteenth.
Novelists embody plural selves all the time. What are characters, after all, if not other selves?
He was a dreamer, a thinker, a speculative philosopher... or, as his wife would have it, an idiot.
Being an unpublished novelist has about as much social acceptability as being a shopping bag lady.
Once upon a time, novelists of the 19th century, such as Charles Dickens, published in serial form.
Henry James claim that if you want to be a novelist you should be somebody on whom nothing is lost.