Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I recognize myself to be an intensely naive person. Most novelists are, despite frequent pretensions to deep socio-political insight.
If I actually believed that the progress of human understanding depended on our crop of contemporary novelists, I would shoot myself.
I'm inspired by playwrights, novelists, poets: The value of language has been a lifelong passion of mine. I enjoy it. I'm good at it.
Jane Austen was an extraordinary woman; to actually be able to survive as a novelist in those days - unmarried - was just unheard of.
The Novelist, afraid his ideas may be foolish, slyly puts them in the mouth of some other fool and reserves the right to disavow them.
I never see a novel as a film while I'm writing it. Mostly because novels and films are so different, and I'm such an internal novelist
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.
I resist when someone calls me a novelist: it implies some kind of inherent superiority of the novel. I'm not a novelist, I'm a writer.
In Hollywood, they think they know it all. You, as a writer, are essentially an outsider. Novelists and short-story writers, especially.
To speak today of a famous novelist is like speaking of a famous cabinetmaker or speedboat designer. Adjective is inappropriate to noun.
You simply cannot invent any conspiracy theory so ridiculous and obviously satirical that some people somewhere don't already believe it.
We live in an age in which the imagination of the novelist is helpless against what he knows he is going to read in tomorrow's newspaper.
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 think it's restrictive to typecast myself as a novelist because I enjoy other forms of expression. I love literature and I love cinema.
All good novelists have bad memories. What you remember comes out as journalism; what you forget goes into the compost of the imagination.
For a novelist, a given historic situation is an anthropologic laboratory in which he explores his basic question: What is human existence?
I wrote four novels, but then I realized that the world didn't need me to be a novelist, but the world could use me as a nonfiction writer.
The idea of being a novelist is really romantic, but it's kind of the same as being president of the United States - it's not gonna happen.
Novelists should be free to write whatever they want, to let their imaginations roam as close to or as removed from reality as they see fit.
I had always thought that the idea of love at first sight was one of those things invented by lady novelists from the South with three names.
The art of fiction does not begin until the novelist thinks of his story as a matter to be shown, to be so exhibited that it will tell itself.
Because I'm a novelist, I think in terms of structure. The way I keep going is through structure. It's what inspires me and pushes me through.
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.
The object of the novelist is to keep the reader entirely oblivious of the fact that the author exists - even of the fact he is reading a book.
If you write a screenplay that gets circulated, you have a bigger readership than any literary novelist. And it's an educated audience as well.
RICE-WATER, n. A mystic beverage secretly used by our most popular novelists and poets to regulate the imagination and narcotize the conscience.
The suspense in a novel is not only in the reader, but in the novelist himself, who is intensely curious too about what will happen to the hero.
It is part of the novelist's convention not to mention soup and salmon and ducklings, as if soup and salmon and ducklings were of no importance.
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.
Things that appear on the front page of the newspaper as 'fact' are far more dangerous than the games played by a novelist, and can lead to wars.
Maybe with "Californication" the character was partly based on Rick Moody. I read him and Jay McInerney, the templates for this bad boy novelist.
Flora sighed. It was curious that persons who lived what the novelists called a rich emotional life always seemed to be a bit slow on the uptake.
How can we expect novelists to be moral, when their trade forces them to treat every end they meet as no more than an imperfect means to a novel?
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.
The business of the poet and the novelist is to show the sorriness underlying the grandest things and the grandeur underlying the sorriest things.
The ancient historians gave us delightful fiction in the form of fact; the modern novelist presents us with dull facts under the guise of fiction.
Novelists are in the business of constructing consciousness out of words, and that's what we all do, cradle to grave. The self is a story we tell.
The few really great-the major novelists ... are significant in terms of the human awareness they promote; awareness of the possibilities of life.
I became fascinated by the fact that people write to give away rather than write to be read. It's the difference between playwrights and novelists.
Thriller novelists get asked - berated, sometimes - about whether their work glorifies bad behavior, even, exploits human tragedy for entertainment.
Novelists tend to go off at 70, and I'm in a funk about it, I've got myself into a real paranoid funk about it, how the talent dies before the body.
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.
I was a novelist before I was a TV screenwriter. Actually, as a kid, I think I'd always wanted to be a writer, but never thought that I would be one.
I meet kids now who become novelists, poets, write for the theater and movies, who were simply inspired by what they saw during the Spoleto Festival.
Novelists seem to fall into two distinct categories - those that plan and those that just see where it takes them. I am very much the former category.
Poets and novelists and playwrights make themselves, against terrible resistances, give over what the rest of us keep safely locked within our hearts.
Not since Lord of the Flies has a novelist written with such perceptiveness about the potential for harm that lurks within the innocence of childhood.
It is true that novelists are shameless and obey no decent law, and they are not to be trusted on any account, but some Mysteries even they must honor.
The writer - more especially the novelist - who has not, at one moment or another, considered his publisher unworthy of him, has still to be conceived.
Americans and their desire to be novelists, the American novel should be listed in medical dictionaries alongside Megalomania and Obsessional Neuroses.