Novelist Quotes

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

One more recent novelist to come along is Cormac McCarthy. Him, I like.

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.

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.

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'm not a biographer, I'm a novelist.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

For me, as a beginning novelist, all other living writers form a control group for whom the world is a placebo.

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.

Yes, but also one of the problems for a novelist in Ireland is the fact that there are no formal manners. I mean some people have beautiful manners but there's no kind of agreed form of manners.

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.

The essayist has to follow a certain intellectual pattern. The novelist has the advantage of using fantasy, of being subjective.

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 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.

To be a novelist, all I need is a pen and a piece of paper.

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.

Well I'm not a novelist. I've only written one book and that is a memoir.