Novelist Quotes

I thought I wanted to be a journalist or a novelist.

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.

So, how to stay inside the world of entertainment without actually getting another job? I felt the only logical answer was to become a novelist. So I wrote the first book - driven by some very real feelings of desperation - and it worked.

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.

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.

The function of the novelist... is to comment upon life as he sees it.

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.

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.

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.

No poet or novelist wishes he were the only one who ever lived, but most of them wish they were the only one alive, and quite a number fondly believe their wish has been granted.

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.

Jane Austen was an extraordinary woman; to actually be able to survive as a novelist in those days - unmarried - was just unheard of.

The fact is that in this day and age I don't think any novelist can assume that a book will get attention.

The novel, for me, was an accident. I really don't consider myself a novelist.

I don't think any novelist should be concerned with literature.

I was going to be a great woman novelist. Then the war came along and I think it's hard for young people today, don't you, to realize that when World War II happened we were dying to go and help our country.

Let's put it this way: if you are a novelist, I think you start out with a 20 word idea, and you work at it and you wind up with a 200,000 word novel. We, picture-book people, or at least I, start out with 200,000 words and I reduce it to 20.

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.

The novelist teaches the reader to comprehend the world as a question. There is wisdom and tolerance in that attitude. In a world built on sacrosanct certainties the novel is dead.

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.

For a novelist, a given historic situation is an anthropologic laboratory in which he explores his basic question: What is human existence?

I had thought of writing, actually, and that later on I'd be a novelist.

The artist deals in what cannot be said in words. The artist whose medium is fiction does this in words. The novelist says in words what cannot be said in words.

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.

But here's the thing: what you do as a screenwriter is you sell your copyright. As a novelist, as a poet, as a playwright, you maintain your copyright.

Historian: an unsuccessful novelist.