Novelist Quotes

I think that if the novel's task is to describe where we find ourselves and how we live now, the novelist must take a good, hard look at the most central facts of contemporary life - technology and science.

If the novelist shares his or her problems with the characters, he or she is able to study his personal unconscious.

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.

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'm a big, bombastic novelist and thrill-ride guy. I'm never going to win the National Book Award.

The suspense of a novel is not only in the reader, but in the novelist, who is intensely curious about what will happen to the hero.

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 couple years ago, the novelist Russell Banks told me he was reading the ancient Greek historian Herodotus. I asked why. He said, 'Because I've always wanted to and am tired of having my reading assigned.' I thought it was a marvelous declaration of independence.

I am worrying about my country. I feel I have a responsibility as a novelist to do something.

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.

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.

Mark Twain was a great traveler and he wrote three or four great travel books. 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.

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.

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.

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'm always determined that as a novelist I'm going to go out there and research my characters very thoroughly before I start writing.

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

I never met anybody in my life who says, I want to be a critic. People want to be a fireman, poet, novelist.

Being a novelist is hard for anyone - male or female. You don't get to quit your day job.

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.

Both the historian and the novelist view history as the struggle of a tiny minority, able and determined to make judgments, which is up against a vast and densely packed majority of the blind, who are led by their instincts and unable to think for themselves.

I am a better novelist than a poet, playwright, or essayist.

I was directed because I knew I wanted to be a novelist, but I didn't have a very good job or a way of getting published. I found those years to be among the most difficult of my life.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The materials of the novelist must be real; they must be gathered from the field of humanity by his actual observation.

Miss Austen had shown the infinite possibilities of ordinary and present things for the novelist.

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.