Southerners make good novelists: they have so many stories because they have so much family. — Gore Vidal Copy Share Image
The great European novel started out as entertainment, and every true novelist is nostalgic for it. In fact, the themes of those… — Milan Kundera Copy Share Image
I became fascinated by the fact that people write to give away rather than write to be read. It's the difference between… — David Suchet Copy Share Image
Truth is the recognition of reality; reason, man's only means of knowledge, is his only standard of truth. — Ayn Rand Copy Share Image
There are many reasons why novelists write, but they all have one thing in common - a need to create an alternative… — John Fowles Copy Share Image
Novelists do not write as birds sing, by the push of nature. It is part of the job that there should be… — William Golding Copy Share Image
We all now tell stories by cutting from one dramatic scene to the next, whereas Victorian novelists felt free to write long… — Ken Follett Copy Share Image
I think I belong to America's last generation of novelists. Novelists will come one by one from now on, not in seeming… — Kurt Vonnegut Copy Share Image
A movie will do in one second, with one image, what it will take a novelist at least a page to describe. — Yann Martel Copy Share Image
I don't believe in the meteoric culture of anxiety, generally. Obviously, some people have it, some people are crippled by it, but… — Andrew O'Hagan Copy Share Image
To call Clive Barker a 'horror novelist' would be like calling the Beatles a 'garage band'... He is the great imaginer of… — Quentin Tarantino Copy Share Image
The preoccupation of the novelist: how to capture the living moments, was answered by the diary. You write while you are alive.… — Anais Nin Copy Share Image
I see myself as a novelist, period. I mean, the material I work with is what is classified as science fiction and… — Roger Zelazny Copy Share Image
I think it's also the case that I'm not as widely travelled, or as well-educated in history, as most of the other… — Jonathan Coe Copy Share Image
When you get into a tight place, and everything goes against you till it seems as if you could n't hold on… — Harriet Beecher Stowe Copy Share Image
An important factor to note is that it's rare for anyone to sell a first novel written before they turned 30-35; long-format… — Charles Stross Copy Share Image
Morality for the novelist is expressed not so much in the choice of subject matter as in the plot of the narrative,… — Jane Rule Copy Share Image
The Treatise of the Three Impostors is a book that enjoyed centuries of notorious nonexistence until (as Voltaire would say) it became… — Joscelyn Godwin Copy Share Image
A friend of mine who writes history books said to me that he thought that the two creatures most to be pitied… — Katherine Paterson Copy Share Image
“More seriously-and this is probably why there has been a lot of garbage talked about a lost generation-it was easy to see,… — Salman Rushdie Copy Share Image
Art is created to make us, to make our passage through the world better, fruitful - and I would say that every… — Chinua Achebe Copy Share Image
It is morally obscene to regard wealth as an anonymous, tribal product and to talk about 'redistributing' it. — Ayn Rand Copy Share Image
I never see a novel as a film while I'm writing it. Mostly because novels and films are so different, and I'm… — Alice Hoffman Copy Share Image
The difference between a novelist and someone who tinkers around with writing is this: novelists finish their books. — Nancy Etchemendy Copy Share Image
I think of myself as a songwriter, a weaver of story and imagination in a way that a novelist might write a… — PJ Harvey Copy Share Image
To survive, each sentence must have, at its heart, a little spark of fire, and this, whatever the risk, the novelist must… — Virginia Woolf Copy Share Image
I am not an academic who happens to have written a novel. I am a novelist who happens to be quite good… — A. S. Byatt Copy Share Image
I'm probably the only novelist who has ever written about political fugitives who actually knew a lot about them, had contact with… — Marge Piercy Copy Share Image
San Francisco has long been a leader in the arts, nurturing generations of painters, sculptors, poets, novelists, playwrights, film-makers, and performing artists… — Gavin Newsom Copy Share Image
Icelanders are grateful to meet foreigners who have heard of their country. And even more grateful to hear someone say it deserves… — Halldór Laxness Copy Share Image
Not long ago, a novelist could believe he could have an effect on our consciousness of terror. Today, the men who shape… — Don DeLillo Copy Share Image
No, Paul, I couldn't care less if you tell me made-up stories. Our lies reveal as much about us as our truths.'… — Anonymous Copy Share Image
I get work because I'm primarily a novelist but I've become script doctor. I can work back and forth between French and… — Norman Spinrad Copy Share Image
Selfish men make the best lovers. They're prepared to invest in the women's pleasures so that they can collect an even bigger… — J. G. Ballard Copy Share Image
Novelists don't age as quickly as philosophers, who often face professional senility in their late twenties. — Martin Amis Copy Share Image
Universities are filled with poets and novelists conducting demure and careful lives in imitation of Eliot and Forster and those others who… — Gore Vidal Copy Share Image
There was never a good biography of a good novelist. There couldn't be. He is too many people if he's any good. — F. Scott Fitzgerald Copy Share Image
On lady novelists: As artists they're rot, but as providers they're oil wells; they gush. Norris said she never wrote a story… — Dorothy Parker Copy Share Image
Novels are fictions and therefore they tell lies, but through those lies every novelist attempts to tell the truth about the world. — Paul Auster Copy Share Image
Women need to become literary criminals, break the literary laws and reinvent their own, because the established laws prevent women from presenting… — Kathy Acker Copy Share Image
