Novelist Quotes

You say that you hope I will be recognized as the best novelist of my generation. I want you to know now and know completely that that would mean to me absolutely nothing.

The job of the novelist is to invent: to embroider, to color, to embellish, to make things up.

As a novelist, you could say that I am dreaming while I am awake, and every day I can continue with yesterday's dream. Because it is a dream, there are so many contradictions and I have to adjust them to make the story work. But, in principle, the original dream does not change.

Manners are of such great consequence to the novelist that any kind will do. Bad manners are better than no manners at all, and because we are losing our customary manners, we are probably overly conscious of them; this seems to be a condition that produces writers.

It's like a novelist writing far out things. If it makes a point and makes sense, then people like to read that. But if it's off in left field and goes over the edge, you lose it. The same with musical talent, I think.

He was interviewed in the early '60s by a young novelist, Pati Hill.

I think the hardest part of writing is revising. And by that I mean the following: A novelist has to create the piece of marble and then chip away to find the figure in it.

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.

I was writing from the time I was 12 years old, but I originally wanted to be a novelist.

I'm mostly a novelist these days, but I have written short stories in Fantasy, Science Fiction and horror.

Not until my middle thirties did I consider myself a novelist.

The historian will tell you what happened. The novelist will tell you what it felt like.

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

A novelist should not be too intelligent either, although... he may be permitted to be an intellectual.

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.

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.

Among the many problems which beset the novelist, not the least weighty is the choice of the moment at which to begin his novel.

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.

What description of clouds and sunsets was to the old novelist, description of scientific apparatus and methods is to the modern Scientific Detective writer.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.