Novelist Quotes
- Page 3In 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.
Donna Tartt
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.
Terence Rattigan
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.
Jodi Picoult
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.
Alice Hoffman
Being a novelist is hard for anyone - male or female. You don't get to quit your day job.
Jennifer Weiner
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.
Lee Child
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.
Chris Cleave
I never met anybody in my life who says, I want to be a critic. People want to be a fireman, poet, novelist.
Leslie Fiedler
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.
Jeffrey Eugenides
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.
J. B. Priestley
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.
Lion Feuchtwanger
Miss Austen had shown the infinite possibilities of ordinary and present things for the novelist.
George Saintsbury
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.
W. H. Auden
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.
James Ellroy
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.
Vladimir Nabokov
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.
David Halberstam
The materials of the novelist must be real; they must be gathered from the field of humanity by his actual observation.
Goldwin Smith
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.
Julia Child
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.
Eric Carle
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.
Suzanne Fields
Jane Austen was an extraordinary woman; to actually be able to survive as a novelist in those days - unmarried - was just unheard of.
Julie Walters