Novelist Quotes

I am a fictionalizing philosopher, not a novelist. ~ Philip K. Dick

The complexion of a novelist is seldom rosy (Paul Bailey once announced to a heavy-hearted audience of novelists at PEN that we have always been an ugly tribe). We are engaged in indoor activity, haemorrhoidal, prone to chillblains, poor of circulation. ~ Jane Gardam

The novelist is required to open his eyes on the world around him and look. If what he sees is not highly edifying, he is still required to look. Then he is required to reproduce, with words, what he sees. ~ Flannery O'Connor

It is to be regretted that no mental method of daguerreotype or photography has yet been discovered by which the characters of men can be reduced to writing and put into grammatical language with an unerring precision of truthful description. How often does the novelist feel, ay, and the historian also and the biographer, that he has conceived within his mind and accurately depicted on the tablet of his brain the full character and personage of man, and that nevertheless, when he flies to pen and ink to perpetuate the portrait, his words forsake, elude, disappoint, and play the deuce with him, till at the end of a dozen pages the man described has no more resemblance to the man conceived than the signboard at the coner of the street has to the Duke of Cambridge? ~ Anthony Trollope

Be born anywhere, little embryo novelist, but do not be born under the shadow of a great creed, not under the burden of original sin, not under the doom of Salvation. ~ Pearl S. Buck

The painter paints, the musician makes music, the novelist writes novels. But I believe that we all have some influence, not because of the fact that one is an artist, but because we are citizens. As citizens, we all have an obligation to intervene and become involved, it's the citizen who changes things. I can't imagine myself outside any kind of social or political involvement. ~ Jose Saramago

It is a mistake to think of the expatriate as someone who abdicates, who withdraws and humbles himself, resigned to his miseries, his outcast state. On a closer look, he turns out to be ambitious, aggressive in his disappointments, his very acrimony qualified by his belligerence. The more we are dispossessed, the more intense our appetites and illusions become. I even discern some relation between misfortune and megalomania. The man who has lost everything preserves as a last resort the hope of glory, or of literary scandal. He consents to abandon everything, except his name. [ . . . ]

Let us say a man writes a novel which makes him, overnight, a celebrity. In it he recounts his sufferings. His compatriots in exile envy him: they too have suffered, perhaps more. And the man without a country becomes - or aspires to become - a novelist. The consequence: an accumulation of confusions, an inflation of horrors, of frissons that date. One cannot keep renewing Hell, whose very characteristic is monotony, or the face of exile either. Nothing in literature exasperates a reader so much as The Terrible; in life, it too is tainted with the obvious to rouse our interest. But our author persists; for the time being he buries his novel in a drawer and awaits his hour. The illusion of surprise, of a renown which eludes his grasp but on which he reckons, sustains him; he lives on unreality. Such, however, is the power of this illusion that if, for instance, he works in some factor ~ Emil M. Cioran

Felicia's Journey by the Irish short-story writer and novelist William Trevor. ~ Will Schwalbe

The choice of the point(s) of view from which the story is told is arguably the most important single decision that the novelist has to make, for it fundamentally affects the way readers will respond, emotionally and morally, to the fictional characters and their actions. The story of an adultery, for instance - any adultery - will affect us differently according to whether it is presented primarily from the point of view of the unfaithful person, or the injured spouse, or the lover - or as observed by some fourth party. Madame Bovary narrated mainly from the point of view of Charles Bovary would be a very different book from the one we know. ~ David Lodge

Novel-writing is not so much a profession as a yoga, or "way," an alternative to ordinary life-in-the-world. Its benefits are quasi-religious - a changed quality of mind and heart, satisfactions no non-novelist can understand - and its rigors generally bring no profit except to the spirit. For those who are authentically called to the profession, spiritual profits are enough.
John Gardner ~ Marcy Sheiner

There seems a general wish of decrying the capacity and undervaluing the labor of the novelist, and of slighting performances which have only genius, wit and taste to recommend them. ~ Jane Austen

I guess I've always been an aspiring novelist. I went to Princeton and wrote a novel for my thesis. ~ Howard Gordon

The novelist Umberto Eco famously kept what the writer Nassim Taleb called an "anti-library," a vast collection of books he had not read, believing that one's personal trove should contain as much of what you don't know as possible. Some ~ Pamela Paul

Americans would have a right to go to war with the Iraqis if we could name one author from Iraq. It disturbs me that we're going to war with somebody we know absolutely nothing about. Name one Iraqi poet, one Iraqi woman activist, one Iraqi singer. Name one Iraqi novelist. You can't. And how can you go kill someone you don't know anything about? ~ Jimmy Santiago Baca

In many ways ... the completeness of biography, the achievement of its professionalization, is an ironic fiction, since no life can ever be known completely, nor would we want to know every fact about an individual. Similarly, no life is ever lived according to aesthetic proportions. The "plot" of a biography is superficially based on the birth, life and death of the subject; "character," in the vision of the author. Both are as much creations of the biographer, as they are of a novelist. We content ourselves with "authorized fictions. ~ Ira Bruce Nadel

As a novelist, I tell stories and people give me money. Then financial planners tell me stories and I give them money. ~ Martin Cruz Smith

As a novelist, where do you go to tap into memories, and impressions, and sensations? It's usually, in my experience, your early life, before you started thinking of yourself as a writer, because somehow those experiences are unadulterated. ~ William Boyd

What some people call a nightmare, a writer calls a plot. ~ James R. Paddock

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. ~ John Barth

I had wanted to be a novelist for so long, but I didn't have a story. That story came from the death of my father, and wrestling with how to help my mother. Writing it allowed me to work through my fears, frustrations and desires. I wanted control over the situation. And I wasn't sure I would have any in real life. ~ Robert Crais

Nicholas Sparks recently went on record as saying he is a greater novelist than Cormac McCarthy. This is true in the same sense that I am a better novelist than William Shakespeare. ~ Roger Ebert

A warm sunny evening, the plash and gurgle of the waves in the rock pools, the rush of the cold gin. I thought for the first time of my novel, abandoned, all these years, and I came up, unprompted, with the perfect title. Octet. Octet by Logan Mountstuart. Perhaps I will surprise them all, yet. ~ William Boyd

The lady who works in the grocery store at the corner of my block is called Denise, and she's one of America's great unpublished novelists. Over the years she's written forty-two romantic novels, none of which have ever reached the bookstores. I, however, have been fortunate enough to hear the plots of the last twenty-seven of these recounted in installments by the authoress herself every time I drop by the store for a jar of coffee or can of beans, and my respect for Denise's literary prowess knows no bounds. So, naturally enough, when I found myself faced with the daunting task of actually starting the book you now hold in your hands, it was Denise I turned to for advice. ~ Dave Gibbons

In Europe, I'm recognized on the street sometimes. And that's cool, because I don't have to live there and deal with it every day. Unless you're Stephen King - a great writer, by the way, and anyone who says different knows nothing about the craft - you're more likely to be recognized in America if you play in a soap opera than if you're a novelist. ~ George Pelecanos

Victor-Marie Hugo (26 February 1802 - 22 May 1885) was a French poet, novelist, playwright, essayist, visual artist, statesman, human rights campaigner, and perhaps the most influential exponent of the Romantic movement in France. In France, Hugo's literary reputation rests on his poetic and dramatic output. Among many volumes of poetry, Les Contemplations and La Légende des siècles stand particularly high in critical esteem, and Hugo is sometimes identified as the greatest French poet. In the English-speaking world his best-known works are often the novels Les Misérables and Notre-Dame de Paris (sometimes translated into English as The Hunchback of Notre-Dame). Though extremely conservative in his youth, Hugo moved to the political left as the decades passed; he became a passionate supporter of republicanism, and his work touches upon most of the political and social issues and artistic trends of his time. Source: Wikipedia ~ Victor Hugo

I remember calling the council's cemetery department to ask about body decomposition in different soil types. Once they had verified that I was a novelist and not a sicko, they were extremely helpful. ~ Sara Sheridan

Who is better off? The one who writes to revel in the voluptuousness of the life that surrounds them? Or the one who writes to escape the tediousness of that which awaits them outside? Whose flame will last longer? ~ Roman Payne

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

If you don't know what those old occupations were, how they were done, and how they interacted with the passersby, you're not prepared to write a historical novel. A historical figure doesn't pass through a blank countryside. That means you, the novelist, must learn by research what the whole place was like in those times. As much as you can, you must be like someone who has lived there, because you're going to be not just the storyteller but also the tour guide taking your readers through the past. ~ James Alexander Thom

I suppose I am a born novelist, for the things I imagine are more vital and vivid to me than the things I remember. ~ Ellen Glasgow

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. ~ Flannery O'Connor

Naturally, it was easier for me to envision becoming a novelist than it is for most people. I had two great in-house teachers; I had parents who considered a career in the arts a real possibility rather than a dreamy arrow shot into the sky. ~ Jesse Kellerman

People have obsessions and fears and passions which they don't admit to. I think every character is interesting and has extremes. It's the novelist privilege to see how odd everyone is. ~ Iris Murdoch

Society is the stage on which manners are shown; novels are the literature. Novels are the journal or record of manners; and the new importance of these books derives from the fact, that the novelist begins to penetrate the surface, and treat this part of life more worthily. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

For the vision of a novelist is both complex and specialised; complex, because behind his characters and apart from them must stand something stable to which he relates them; specialised because since he is a single person with one sensibility the aspects of life in which he can believe with conviction are strictly limited ~ Virginia Woolf

Sometimes I don't even know why I'm writing what I'm writing...
I'm just following these people around and taking notes. ~ P. Anastasia

Amanda herself couldn't understand why her writing was so different from her own personality. Her pen seemed to take on a life of its own when she sat before a sheaf of blank parchment paper. She wrote about characters unlike any people she had ever known... sometimes violent, brutal, always passionate; some who came to ruin and some who even triumphed in spite of their own lack of morality. Since she had no actual pattern on which to base these fictional characters, Amanda realized that their feelings, their passions, could only have come from inside herself. ~ Lisa Kleypas

In every interview I'm asked what's the most important quality a novelist has to have. It's pretty obvious: talent. Now matter how much enthusiasm and effort you put into writing, if you totally lack literary talent you can forget about being a novelist. This is more of a prerequisite than a necessary quality. If you don't have any fuel, even the best car won't run.The problem with talent, though, is that in most cases the person involved can't control its amount or quality. You might find the amount isn't enough and you want to increase it, or you might try to be frugal and make it last longer, but in neither case do things work out that easily. Talent has a mind of its own and wells up when it wants to, and once it dries up, that's it. Of course, certain poets and rock singers whose genius went out in a blaze of glory - people like Schubert and Mozart, whose dramatic early deaths turned them into legends - have a certain appeal, but for the vast majority of us this isn't the model we follow.
If I'm asked what the next most important quality is for a novelist, that's easy too: focus - the ability to concentrate all your limited talents on whatever's critical at the moment. Without that you can't accomplish anything of value, while, if you can focus effectively, you'll be able to compensate for an erratic talent or even a shortage of it. I generally concentrate on work for three or four hours every morning. I sit at my desk and focus totally on what I'm writing. I don't ~ Haruki Murakami

She had a brief affair with a novelist, W. L. River, whose Death of a Young Man had been published several years earlier. He called her Motsie and pledged himself to her in letters composed of stupendously long run-on sentences, in one case seventy-four lines of single-spaced typewriting. At the time this passed for experimental prose.
"I want nothing from life except you," he wrote. "I want to be with you forever, to work and write for you, to live wherever you want to live, to love nothing, nobody but you, to love you with the passion of earth but also with the above earthly elements of more eternal, spiritual love. ... "
He did not, however, get his wish. ~ Erik Larson

I became interested, through reading the works of some novelist, in Egyptology and made a study of the pyramids. It was just a hobby, but I had a desire to know all I could about everything I could. ~ Charles M. Schwab

I resist when someone calls me a novelist: it implies some kind of inherent superiority of the novel. I'm not a novelist, I'm a writer. ~ Aleksandar Hemon

As long as I can remember I have been carelessly casting myself uninvited into novels where no self-respecting novelist would have me. This literary gate-crashing of mine must be a sign of a wretched thirsting after immortality. ~ Guy Vanderhaeghe

I am a novelist turned temporary adventurer, and I chose to write television, movies and plays for much the same reason that Henry Morgan selected the Spanish Main for his peculiar - and not dissimilar - sphere of operations. ~ Gore Vidal

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

I am a man and alive. For this reason I am a novelist. And, being a novelist, I consider myself superior to the saint, te scientist, the philosopher, and the poet, who are all great masters of different bits of man alive, but never get the whole hog ... Only in the novel are all things given full play. ~ D.H. Lawrence

Writing tends to be very deliberate. A novelist could probably run a military campaign with some success. They could certainly run a country. ~ Colm Toibin

I'm a natural novelist. I'm interested in the person and the group, and how they mesh. And one of the ways I don't want them to mesh is for the person to be subsumed into the group. ~ Jane Smiley

In an interview in the Paris Review, novelist and Rebel John Gardner made an observation that I've never forgotten: Every time you break the law you pay, and every time you obey the law you pay. ~ Gretchen Rubin

Novelist time is reptile time; novelists tend to be ruminant and brooding, nursers of ancient grievances, second-guessers, Tuesday afternoon quarterbacks, retrospectators, endlessly, like slumping hitters, studying the film of their old whiffs. ~ Michael Chabon

No one, at any rate no English writer, has written better about childhood than Dickens. In spite of all the knowledge that has accumulated since, in spite of the fact that children are now comparatively sanely treated, no novelist has shown the same power of entering into the child's point of view. ~ George Orwell

When I was in fourth grade, a novelist came to talk to my English class. She told us that being an author meant sitting at the kitchen table in pajamas, drinking tea with the dogs at your feet. ~ J. Courtney Sullivan

Sometimes writing a novel is not unlike having a baby. You'd have to ask a female novelist to compare the pain. ~ Salman Rushdie

The historian Major-General Sir David Stewart of Garth described them as an 'excellent, orderly regiment of well-behaved serviceable men, fit for any duty' and the novelist Sir Walter Scott used his journal to call them a 'regiment of Sutherland giants'. (One of their number was Samuel McDonald, a native of Lairg, who was seven feet four inches tall. Throughout the army he was known as 'Big Sam'.) ~ Trevor Royle

Life is full of beautiful moments. Live your life to the fullest. And do what you
love. ~ Santonu Kumar Dhar

My mother's husband Harry Bloom was a writer, a novelist, a reporter, and an anti-apartheid activist. ~ Orlando Bloom

So much of a novelist's writing ... takes place in the unconscious: in those depths the last word is written before the word appears on paper. We remember the details of our story, we do not invent them. ~ Graham Greene

I wasn't always a novelist. I began my writing career as a journalist, working on an afternoon newspaper in Sydney, Australia, doing the crime beat and court reporting. Having grown up in a small country town, I felt as though I had nothing to write about. ~ Michael Robotham

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. ~ Beth Henley

It is the function of the novelist to reveal the hidden life at its source: to tell us more about Queen Victoria than could be known, and thus to produce a character who is not the Queen Victoria of history. ~ E. M. Forster

Not since Lord of the Flies has a novelist written with such perceptiveness about the potential for harm that lurks within the innocence of childhood. ~ Paula Sharp

I like to think of myself as an unmediated novelist - or perhaps a national novelist. ~ E.L. Doctorow

It is fatal to know too much at the outcome: boredom comes as quickly to the traveler who knows his route as to the novelist who is over certain of his plot. ~ Paul Theroux

As a novelist, you have to be free. Books can't be an act of filial duty. ~ Richard Flanagan

I'm not a biographer, I'm a novelist. ~ Barry Unsworth

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

That's the novelist's job: to peel back the layers and look underneath. ~ David Bergen

Literature, after all, from Homer onwards, is littered with the recounting of deaths and with the fascination for death, and in this it only expresses what we all repeatedly dwell on but do not necessarily or readily voice. So far as death goes, I don't claim any oddity. There is only one sea: I'm in the same boat as everyone else. And that seems, more generally, to be the position that every novelist, unless they are possessed of a peculiar arrogance, should take: I am mortal too, I am human too. I too, like you, share life's joys, pains, confusions. We're all in the same boat. ~ Graham Swift

A novelist is a person who lives in other people's skins. ~ E.L. Doctorow

You are an author, a public figure. You are going to be judged no matter what you write, so live your life in a way that's pleasing and congruent to your soul ~ Sarah Gerdes

You could use a moth like that as a symbol in a novel, but it was trite, wasn't it? The old moth-to-the-flame image had been used and used again. It was the stuff of amateur poetry. And she, having so little experience crafting a story, would be the most in danger of falling into trite approaches. If she wrote a novel, it probably would be about her father. And the male Luna moth would haunt its pages. Everyone would recognize the work as that of a first novelist. "She wrote about herself through the lens of her father."
The really good novelists, Laura thought, put their fathers, and maybe their mothers too, deeper into the stories. Which, she suddenly thought, might redeem Melville just the littlest bit. ~ L.L. Barkat

A good TV writer needs all the same tricks a good novelist has. ~ Dean Bakopoulos

The novelist must be his own most harsh critic and also his own most loving admirer and about both he must say nothing. ~ Angus Wilson

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

If you're a novelist, as I am in real life, you're usually so desperate for any kind of feedback. ~ Adam Mansbach

To tell you the truth. I am a wild and passionate novelist. I am therefore easily given over to telling wild and passionate lies. ~ Val Edward Simone

Is it not possible that the accent falls a little differently, that the moment of importance came before or after, that, if one were free and could set down what one chose, there would be no plot,the moment of importance came before or after, that, if one were free and could set down what one chose, there would be no plot, little probability, and a vague general confusion in which the clear-cut features of the tragic, the comic, the passionate, and the lyrical were dissolved beyond the possibility of separate recognition? The mind, exposed to the ordinary course of life, receives upon its surface a myriad impressions--trivial, fantastic, evanescent, or engraved with the sharpness of steel. From all sides they come, an incessant shower of innumerable atoms, composing in their sum what we might venture to call life itself; and to figure further as the semi-transparent envelope, or luminous halo, surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end. Is it not perhaps the chief task of the novelist to convey this incessantly varying spirit with whatever stress or sudden deviation it may display, and as little admixture of the alien and external as possible? We are not pleading merely for courage and sincerity; but suggesting that the proper stuff for fiction is a little other than custom would have us believe it. ~ Virginia Woolf

I'm not imprisoned in any one medium. In films I use techniques that are not necessarily what other directors attempt. When I write novels I also use techniques which can run counter to those that a novelist would use. ~ Philippe Claudel

There are days when writing is within my power and a story unfolds along a course I've already chosen. And then there are days when the words breathe on their own and take me by the hand, leading me along unfathomed paths. Either way, the end result is this author's fairytale. ~ Richelle E. Goodrich

I am a huge fan of Alan Furst. Furst is the best in the business
the most talented espionage novelist of our generation. ~ Vince Flynn

Where did the boy genius go? He had been, as a child, expected to be a neurosurgeon, or a great novelist. And now he's considering (or, okay, refusing to consider) law school. Was the burden of his potential too much for him? ~ Michael Cunningham

I have remarked elsewhere that I regard the Almighty as not a bad novelist, except that He is a realist. ~ John Barth

The horror of profound depression, and the hopelessness that usually accompanies it, are hard to imagine for those who have not experienced them. Because the despair is private, it is resistant to clear and compelling description. Novelist William Styron, however, in recounting his struggle with suicidal depression, captures vividly the heavy, inescapable pain that can lead to suicide:

What I had begun to discover is that, mysteriously and in ways that are totally remote from normal experience, the gray drizzle of horror induced by depression takes on the quality of physical pain. But it is not an immediately identifiable pain, like that of a broken limb. It may be more accurate to say that despair, owing to some evil trick played upon the sick brain by the inhabiting psyche, comes to resemble the diabolical discomfort of being imprisoned in a fiercely overheated room. And because no breeze stirs this cauldron, because there is no escape from this smothering confinement, it is entirely natural that the victim begins to think ceaselessly of oblivion. (105) ~ Kay Redfield Jamison

'Floating Worlds,' published in 1975 and the lone science fiction novel by acclaimed historical novelist Cecelia Holland, was unique in being completely devoid of the usual pulp influences present in much space opera up to that time. ~ Pamela Sargent

Really, the novelist has the best casting since he doesn't have to cope with the actors and all the rest.
-Alfred Hitchcock ~ Alfred Hitchcock

including Edna Millay, there were five such women: essayist Maeve Brennan, columnist Neith Boyce, novelist Edith Wharton, and social visionary Charlotte Perkins Gilman. ~ Kate Bolick

Try everything; listen to everyone. Follow no one. You are your own story guru! ~ Jeff Lyons

He was after all, a novelist ... and a novelist was simply a fellow who got paid to tell lies. The bigger the lies, the better the pay. ~ Stephen King

I'm a successful novelist, and I've been a lucky one, so I don't want to cry the poor mouth. Writing has never been easy. ~ Richard Flanagan

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

My first attraction to writing novels was the plot, that almost extinct animal. Those novels I read which made me want to be a novelist were long, always plotted, novels - not just Victorian novels, but also those of my New England ancestors: Herman Melville and Nathaniel Hawthorne. ~ John Irving

She'll be an excellent novelist: a monster of self-absorption. ~ Lan Samantha Chang

If you hear voices, you're a lunatic. If you write down what they say, you're an author. ~ Dani Harper

I spend a lot of time imagining things - in fact, you could say that imagining things is my job. ~ Sara Sheridan

It is possible to be a great novelist - that is, to render a veracious account of your times - and a bad writer - that is, an incompetent practitioner of applied linguistics. ~ Angela Carter

Henry James would have been vastly improved as a novelist by a few whiffs of the Chicago stockyard. ~ H.L. Mencken

Q: What literary complexities do you find most interesting? That is, what do you like most to "solve," so to speak, as a novelist?
A: One wishes to create characters who will speak directly to the minds of comparative literature professors and intelligent book reviewers. ~ Gilbert Sorrentino

I'm a novelist - not an expert on coal mining. I'm not a politician with an agenda to push. I'm not a reporter presenting facts, and I'm not a sociologist documenting the last struggling remnants of blue-collar America. I'm simply an author who sets her books in coal country because it's where I come from, and it's what I know. ~ Tawni O'Dell

And when I'd be reporting in Israel, Palestinians would say, the Jews they're not like us, and the Jews would say the same things about the Palestinians, they don't want what we want. And I never bought it as a reporter and I don't buy it as a novelist. I think, you know, the sound of somebody crying for their lost child sounds the same. ~ Geraldine Brooks

There is only one expert who is qualified to examine the souls and the life of a people and make a valuable report - the native novelist ... And when a thousand able novels have been written, there you have the soul of the people; and not anywhere else can these be had. ~ Mark Twain

Historical fiction is actually good preparation for reading SF. Both the historical novelist and the science fiction writer are writing about worlds unlike our own. ~ Pamela Sargent