Thank God for novelists. Thank God there are people willing to write everything down. Otherwise, so much would be forgotten. — Kurt Vonnegut Copy Share Image
All novelists I speak to about how they started usually say it was by pulling up their roots and going to live… — Deborah Moggach Copy Share Image
The novelist teaches the reader to comprehend the world as a question. There is wisdom and tolerance in that attitude. In a… — Milan Kundera Copy Share Image
I know I'm a rare person, a trained scientist who writes fiction, because so few contemporary novelists engage with science. — Barbara Kingsolver Copy Share Image
The artist deals with what cannot be said in words. The novelist says in words what cannot be said in words. — Barbara Kingsolver Copy Share Image
In order for a long piece of work to engage a novelist over an extended period of time, it has to deal… — Donna Tartt Copy Share Image
I consider myself foremost a novelist with the intent of crafting stories that people will remember. — Nicholas Sparks Copy Share Image
If you are a novelist of a certain type of termperament, then what you really want to do is re-invent the world.… — John Barth 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
There are mythic patterns under all of our lives. Each one of us, often unbeknownst to ourselves, is engaged in a drama… — Deena Metzger Copy Share Image
The Novelist As Teacher”: “I would be quite satisfied if my novels (especially the ones I set in the past) did no… — Chinua Achebe Copy Share Image
So much of a novelist's writing, as I have said, takes place in the unconscious: in those depths the last word is… — Graham Greene Copy Share Image
The novelist loses, every time. Politics is insidious, the modern conduct of war (from shoulder-launched rockets to drone strikes) is insidious. Someone… — Teju Cole Copy Share Image
I am, when you stop to think of it, a member of a fairly select group: the final handful of American novelists… — Stephen King Copy Share Image
Novelists go about the strenuous business of marrying and burying their people, or else they send them to sea, or to Africa,… — Cynthia Ozick Copy Share Image
TO ALL THE ambulance drivers firewatchers air-raid wardens nurses canteen workers airplane spotters rescue workers mathematicians vicars vergers shopgirls chorus girls librarians… — Connie Willis Copy Share Image
The white savior supports brutal policies in the morning, founds charities in the afternoon, and receives awards in the evening. — Teju Cole Copy Share Image
I always have done work on mythic relations since I started writing. I really want to be a novelist, or at least… — Marina Warner Copy Share Image
Intensely vivid characters, terrible crimes, and a brutal deep-frozen landscape all prove beyond a reasonable doubt that cold nurtures good and evil… — Lee Child Copy Share Image
A great novelist excels on the small scale and the large, the individual leaf and root as well as the forest; good… — Laura Miller Copy Share Image
When the Irish novelist John McGahern was a child, his sisters unlaced and removed one of his shoes while he was reading.… — Anne Fadiman Copy Share Image
With a novelist's sense of drama and a historian's understanding of the social forces that shape our lives, Tom Gjelten has captured… — Ronald Steel Copy Share Image
Everything written, if it has anything in it, will offend someone, and if the mere taking of offence was to amount to… — Rex Murphy Copy Share Image
I assume that - because you can get degrees in journalism from very reputable universities - I assume that people can be… — William Gibson Copy Share Image
First-book novelists and storywriters haven't yet failed and so it's easier to publish them - you can gamble on a success. Whereas… — Frederick Busch Copy Share Image
But in this country we have one great privilege which they don't have in other countries. When a thing gets to be… — Mark Twain Copy Share Image
Bitter criticism caused the sensitive Thomas Hardy, one of the finest novelists ever to enrich English literature, to give up forever the… — Dale Carnegie Copy Share Image
History is the history of human behavior, and human behavior is the raw material of fiction. Most people recognize that novelists do… — Amy Waldman Copy Share Image
The business of a novelist is, in my opinion, to create characters first and foremost, and then to set them in the… — John Dos Passos Copy Share Image
What's not realized about good novelists is that they're as competitive as good athletes. They study each other - where the other… — Norman Mailer Copy Share Image
A couple years ago, the novelist Russell Banks told me he was reading the ancient Greek historian Herodotus. I asked why. He… — Richard Russo Copy Share Image
Why should a novelist not also be a historian? To force unnatural divisions within the English language is to work against its… — Peter Ackroyd Copy Share Image
Detach the writer from the milieu where he has experienced his greatest sense of belonging, and you have created a discontinuity within… — Henry Roth Copy Share Image
As a novelist, there are three phone calls you never expect to receive in your lifetime because if you waited for them… — Chris Bohjalian Copy Share Image
The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false… — Isaac Asimov Copy Share Image
Which is mightily ironic since one of the most common criticisms of American women novelists (it's a load of crap but it… — Lidia Yuknavitch Copy Share Image
Manners are of such great consequence to the novelist that any kind will do. Bad manners are better than no manners at… — Flannery O'Connor Copy Share Image
Most good novelists have been women or homosexuals. The novel is the triumphant evolved creation, one increasingly has to think, of these… — Nicholson Baker Copy Share Image
As a novelist, I mined my history, my family and my memory, but in a very specific way. Writing fiction, I never… — Ayelet Waldman Copy Share Image
I didn't start running because somebody asked me to become a runner. Just like I didn't become a novelist because someone asked… — Haruki Murakami Copy Share Image
