Novelist Quotes
- Page 2The historian will tell you what happened. The novelist will tell you what it felt like.
E. L. Doctorow
If the novelist shares his or her problems with the characters, he or she is able to study his personal unconscious.
Manuel Puig
A novelist should not be too intelligent either, although... he may be permitted to be an intellectual.
Anthony Burgess
Sigmund Freud was a novelist with a scientific background. He just didn't know he was a novelist. All those damn psychiatrists after him, they didn't know he was a novelist either.
John Irving
I was writing from the time I was 12 years old, but I originally wanted to be a novelist.
Christopher McQuarrie
I'm mostly a novelist these days, but I have written short stories in Fantasy, Science Fiction and horror.
Sarah Zettel
All novels are about crime. You'd be hard pressed to find any novel that does not have an element of crime. I don't see myself as a crime novelist, but there are crimes in my books. That's the nature of storytelling, if you want to reflect the real world.
Carl Hiaasen
In journalism just one fact that is false prejudices the entire work. In contrast, in fiction one single fact that is true gives legitimacy to the entire work. That's the only difference, and it lies in the commitment of the writer. A novelist can do anything he wants so long as he makes people believe in it.
Gabriel Garcia Marquez
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.
Paul Theroux
Among the many problems which beset the novelist, not the least weighty is the choice of the moment at which to begin his novel.
Vita Sackville-West
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.
Donna Tartt
What description of clouds and sunsets was to the old novelist, description of scientific apparatus and methods is to the modern Scientific Detective writer.
Hugo Gernsback
I am worrying about my country. I feel I have a responsibility as a novelist to do something.
Haruki Murakami
With a novelist, like a surgeon, you have to get a feeling that you've fallen into good hands - someone from whom you can accept the anesthetic with confidence.
Saul Bellow
There's a unique bond of trust between readers and authors that I don't believe exists in any other art form; as a reader, I trust a novelist to give me his or her best effort, however flawed.
Dan Simmons
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.
Jose Saramago
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.
Frederick Wiseman
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.
L. Neil Smith
Being a novelist and being a mother have exactly coincided in my life: the call from my agent saying that I had a contract for my first novel - that was on my answering phone message when I got back from the hospital with my first child.
Barbara Kingsolver
When I'm writing a novel, I'm dealing with a double life. I live in the present at the same time that I live in the past with my characters. It is this that makes a novelist so eccentric and unpleasant.
John Phillips Marquand
The novelist must look on humanity without partiality or prejudice. His sympathy, like that of the historian, must be unbounded, and untainted by sect or party.
Goldwin Smith
For me, as a beginning novelist, all other living writers form a control group for whom the world is a placebo.
Nicholson Baker
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.
Norman Mailer