Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
The lesson you have to learn as novelist is how to be collaborative, and how to say, "I don't get to dictate this."
If the novelist shares his or her problems with the characters, he or she is able to study his personal unconscious.
Being called a 'bad citizen' is a compliment to a novelist, at least to my mind. That's exactly what we ought to do.
I am not an academic who happens to have written a novel. I am a novelist who happens to be quite good academically.
Dostoevsky is such a bad writer it is hard to take him seriously as a novelist, though he is a wonderful philosopher.
The truth is that I know very few novelists who have been satisfied with the adaptation of their books for the screen.
Drawing on real life is what novelists do. It's not the same as reconstructing real life, which is what historians do.
The materials of the novelist must be real; they must be gathered from the field of humanity by his actual observation.
The novelist must be his own most harsh critic and also his own most loving admirer and about both he must say nothing.
Whatever fame a novelist my attain, it's always kind of an anonymous one. I can go anywhere, and no one knows who I am.
If the novelist isn't surprised by where his book ends up, he or she probably hasn't written anything worth remembering.
A novelist who ranks with Proust , Kafka , Musil and his friend James Joyce as one of the enduring pillars of Modernism.
Although some people think I am a romantic novelist I have always thought of myself as a rather gritty radical historian.
I am a huge fan of Alan Furst. Furst is the best in the business--the most talented espionage novelist of our generation.
If you tell a novelist, 'Life's not like that', he has to do something about it. The poet simply replies, 'No, but I am.'
All your questions can be answered, if that is what you want. But once you learn your answers, you can never unlearn them.
Kingsley Amis was one of a trio of brilliant comic novelists who made English literature sparkle in the twentieth century.
There are many reasons why novelists write, but they all have one thing in common - a need to create an alternative world.
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.
Novelists are stamina merchants, grinders, nine-to-fivers, and their career curves follow the usual arc of human endeavour.
I am looking for the novelists whose writing is an extension of their intellect rather than an extension of their neurosis.
Really, the novelist has the best casting since he doesn't have to cope with the actors and all the rest. -Alfred Hitchcock
I know I'm a rare person, a trained scientist who writes fiction, because so few contemporary novelists engage with science.
All novelists write in a different way, but I always write in longhand and then do two versions of typescript on a computer.
Charlie Huston, who showran the first season [of Powers], is a novelist, and likes to internalize fiction as a novelist does.
A novelist must preserve a childlike belief in the importance of things which common sense considers of no great consequence.
For novelists, sharply drawn moral conflicts are often useful, and even human and personal disasters can be seen as material.
I have always loved short stories. I have been at least as influenced by the short story masters as I have been by novelists.
Novelists... fashioning nets to sustain and support the reader as he falls helplessly through the chaos of his own existence.
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.
I knew Id always be a second-rate academic, and I thought, Well, Id rather be a second-rate novelist or even a third-rate one.
A historian may be an artist too, and a novelist is a historian, the preserver, the keeper, the expounder, of human experience.
He looks like a man.' 'How descriptive,' Susan said in a droll tone. 'Remind me never to advise you to seek work as a novelist.
She wasn't doing a thing that I could see, except standing there leaning on the balcony railing, holding the universe together.
I was given a dictionary when I was seven, and I read it because I had nothing else to read. I read it the way you read a book.
I wanted to write about the Korean War, but I had no entry into it that made the kind of sense it needs to make for a novelist.
Rebecca Goldstein is a rare find among contemporary novelists: she has intellectual muscle as well as a tender emotional reach.
The second person to write a story about a young boy and an escaped slave on the Mississippi wasn't a novelist, he was a typist.
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.
The essayist has to follow a certain intellectual pattern. The novelist has the advantage of using fantasy, of being subjective.
Among the many problems which beset the novelist, not the least weighty is the choice of the moment at which to begin his novel.
Most writers are not quick-witted when they talk. Novelists, in particular, drag themselves around in society like gut-shot bears.
Novelists have always had complete freedom to pretty much tell their story any way they saw fit. And that's what I'm trying to do.
I think of myself now as a writer, although I wouldn't go as far as to say 'novelist' because that sounds like a Victorian person.
I want you to be afraid to turn the page (and to do that) you need to show right from the beginning that you're playing for keeps.
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.
Novels are fictions and therefore they tell lies, but through those lies every novelist attempts to tell the truth about the world.
Novelists have to be adept at controlling the flow of information, and, most crucially, they have to be in charge of the narrative.
I couldn't be a novelist for instance. It feels like a very lonely endeavor. I don't know that I could survive the solitude of that.
It may be time for serious literary novelists to take back some of the subject matter we abandoned to hack novelists and the movies.