Novelists Quotes · Page 10

The biggest downside to being a novelist is writing the novel.

— Jill Barnett

Today there are a lot of novelists who seem to be writing to be reviewed, not read.

— Pete Hamill

Novelists embody plural selves all the time. What are characters, after all, if not other selves?

— Siri Hustvedt

A novelist can’t be without a kimono and pen!(Shigure)

— Natsuki Takaya

If you have a dream , don't waste your energies explaining why.

— Paulo Coelho

If you don't care about what people think, you already passed the first step of success.

— Paulo Coelho

“Tricky devils, these novelists. The ink gets into their heads.”

— P.G. Wodehouse

I think thats the most important job of a novelist - to bring authority to their writing.

— Maria Semple

We live in an age in which the imagination of the novelist is helpless against what he knows he is going to…

— Philip Roth

The suspense in a novel is not only in the reader, but in the novelist himself, who is intensely curious too about…

— Mary McCarthy

It is in their 'good' characters that novelists make, unawares, the most shocking self- revelations.

— C. S. Lewis

Never give up on your dream...Perseverance is all important. If you don't have the desire and the belief in yourself to keep…

— Tawni O'Dell

Whatever fame a novelist my attain, it's always kind of an anonymous one. I can go anywhere, and no one knows who…

— Jonathan Kellerman

When men abandon reason, physical force becomes their only means of dealing with one another and of settling disagreements.

— Ayn Rand

Novelists who treat violence and cruelty as something to be exploited for their effect, or to enjoy the pleasure of an evacuation,…

— Storm Jameson

I'm really aware that in fiction, women are pretty much equal. There's a lot of very successful women novelists. Not so much…

— Emma Donoghue

Being a novelist and being a mother have exactly coincided in my life: the call from my agent saying that I had…

— Barbara Kingsolver

Novelists, it seems to me, are the very last people who should be asked to comment on the news of the day,…

— Hilary Mantel

I like grit, I like love and death, I'm tired of irony. ... A lot of good fiction is sentimental. ... The…

— Jim Harrison

Farber had a huge effect on me as a writer. I don't mean I write like him. Farber is, first of all,…

— Greil Marcus

And there are two types of stories. One type is one's own story. The other type is telling the stories of others.…

— Lee Gutkind

For me, film has been good because I'm able to work at top crack, working at something I love to do, in…

— William Monahan

When young people say I want to be a novelist, I'd say, think very carefully about it. There will be very few…

— Paul Auster

A rational mind does not work under compulsion; it does not subordinate its grasp of reality to anyone's orders, directives, or controls;…

— Ayn Rand

Novels are political not because writers carry party cards -- some do, I do not -- but because good fiction is about…

— Orhan Pamuk

“Work—especially the sort of work that gets your hands dirty and that brands you as a member of the working class—no longer…

— Gerald Howard

Well, people have been wondering what's going to happen to the novel for two hundred years; its death has been announced many…

— Mordecai Richler

I had hundreds of books under my skin already. Not selected reading, all of it. Some of it could be called trashy.…

— Zora Neale Hurston

Ashton Ford will come as something of a surprise to those of you who have been with me over the years. This…

— Don Pendleton

Today the crime novelist has one advantage denied to writers of 'straight' or 'literary' novels. Unlike them he can range over all…

— Allan Massie

For me, it is about using everything that is there and using the gaps in the record, figuring out why the gaps…

— Hilary Mantel

I'm completely surrounded, not only my father, but also my three brothers, and Sergio, my husband, all four of them work in…

— Lucia Puenzo

The passion for fact in a raw state is a peculiarity of the novelist.

— Mary McCarthy

Some day, the world will discover that, without thought, there can be no love.

— Ayn Rand

America may have great poets and novelists, but she never will have more than one necromancer.

— Rebecca Harding Davis

Not all novelists are power-hungry madman. Some are power-hungry madwomen.

— Pseudonymous Bosch

The business of the novelist is not to relate great events, but to make small ones interesting.

— Arthur Schopenhauer

While the novelist is banging on his typewriter, the poet is watching a fly in the windowpane.

— Billy Collins

I'm not a philosopher. I am the next thing to a jock, which is a novelist.

— Frederick Busch

I'm a very old-fashioned novelist. I write 19th-century novels, where a lot of rules apply.

— John Irving