Novelists Quotes · Page 13

It is better to write a bad first draft than to write no first draft at all.

— Will Shetterly

You deserve all the good things that happen to you. Don't feel guilty and accept the blessings.

— Paulo Coelho

God gets the great stories. Novelists must make do with more mundane fictions.

— Richard Flanagan

I'm more influenced by novelists than I am by filmmakers.

— Billy Bob Thornton

Avoiding problems you need to face is avoiding the life you need to live.

— Paulo Coelho

“Novelists don’t have answers and ones that do I'm not sure you should trust.”

— David Mitchell

No matter how little a man has he will find that he will always settle for less.

— Charles Bukowski

I'm a novelist, not a social scientist or a commentator.

— Rachel Cusk

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

— Sarah Zettel

Whoever claims the right to redistribute the wealth produced by others is claiming the right to treat human beings as chattel.

— Ayn Rand

I've known several spies who have wanted to become novelists. And novelists who became spies, of course.

— Christopher Koch

But in general, for the purposes of most novelists, the number of objects genuinely necessary for. . .describing a scene will be…

— Elizabeth Bowen

Novelists... fashioning nets to sustain and support the reader as he falls helplessly through the chaos of his own existence.

— Fay Weldon

Whether you're an unpublished novelist or a sixteen-time New York Times bestselling author, you can always improve your craft. You can always…

— Robert Dugoni

Charlie Huston, who showran the first season [of Powers], is a novelist, and likes to internalize fiction as a novelist does.

— Brian Michael Bendis

We Jews, we are the destroyers and will remain the destroyers. Nothing you can do will meet our demands and needs. We…

— Maurice Samuel

When a novelist or screenwriter is looking for a subject, the element he's seeking is conflict. Conflict makes drama. Conflict produces great…

— Steven Pressfield

It is however, difficult to make your narratives relative by yourself. A novelists' work is to provide models to make your narratives…

— Haruki Murakami

People really want to believe that there is no fiction. I think they find it much easier to imagine that novelists are…

— Mark Leyner

The man without a purpose is a man who drifts at the mercy of random feelings or unidentified urges and is capable…

— Ayn Rand

When they can't win a debate (can they ever?), leftists deploy what the late novelist/philosopher Ayn Rand called the argument from intimidation.…

— Don Feder

I have argued about the future of fiction with jaded novelists, far-seeing postmodernists, technologists, television critics. The argument that future generations will…

— Russell Smith

Amos Oz is one of the finest novelists of this entire period. MY MICHAEL is a beautiful work of great depth and…

— Arthur Miller

I became a virtuoso of deceit. It wasn't pleasure I was after, it was knowledge. I consulted the strictest moralists to learn…

— Christopher Hampton

“If human nature does alter it will be because individuals manage to look at themselves in a new way. Here and there…

— E.M. Forster

You do not conceive a novel as easily as you conceive a child, nor even half as easily as you create nonfiction…

— Zelda Popkin

a novelist's chief desire is to be as unconscious as possible. He has to induce in himself a state of perpetual lethargy.…

— Virginia Woolf

I think all those years that I spent as a nurse, from the age of seventeen, just allowed me an insight into…

— Christie Watson

America is also the nameless foreigner, the homeless refugee, the hungry boy begging for a job and the black body dangling on…

— Carlos Bulosan

When I was fifteen I wrote seven hundred pages of an incredibly bad novel - it's a very funny book I still…

— Edward Albee

How can a novelist achieve atonement when, with her absolute power of deciding outcomes, she is also God? There is no one,…

— Ian Mcewan

“There were no rules when it came to writing, he said. Take a close look at the lives of poets and novelists,…

— Paul Auster

It's almost a sort of fairy story tale, just what a novelist would write about a discovery.

— Charles Hard Townes

If these United States can be called a body, then Kentucky can be called its heart.

— Jesse Stuart

You could say that all novels are spy novels and all novelists are spy masters.

— Ian Mcewan

May we understand that joy is not a sin, sacrifice is not a virtue.

— Paulo Coelho

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

— E. L. Doctorow

I think of a designer as a processor of information — like a scriptwriter or a novelist.

— Freeman Thomas

The makers of the short story have rarely been good novelists.

— V. S. Pritchett

A mind attacked and conquered is guided easily away from the paths of its own soul.

— Ayi Kwei Armah