I'm a novelist, so I can't write about ideas unless…

I'm not sure if you can strive your way into a career as a novelist. You have to write books; there are no short…

— Rachel Kushner

As a novelist, you write about social mores, but not everything can be explained.

— Elif Batuman

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

— John Irving

I think of myself as a songwriter, a weaver of story and imagination in a way that a novelist might write a book.

— PJ Harvey

You can't have good ideas unless you have lots of ideas.

— Linus Pauling

You can't have good ideas unless you're willing to generate a lot of bad ones.

— Seth Godin

“You can always borrow ideas; but unless you improve them very significantly, never behave as if they are your own!”

— Mehmet Murat ildan

As both an essayist and science fiction and fantasy novelist, I write about and for the future. I talk about the past to remind…

— Kameron Hurley

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

— Charles Hard Townes

I think it's really boring, from the point of view of the novelist, to write about yourself. Tedious. But that's very hard to explain…

— Peter Carey

“I think that if Mozart were alive today and decided to become a novelist, he would write humorous fantasy.”

— Frank P. Ryan

Every novelist should write something for children at least once in his lifetime.

— Henryk Sienkiewicz

I sometimes feel that my goal as a novelist would be to write a novel in which the language was so transparent that the…

— Paul Auster

I think if I was interested in writing on my own, I would be a novelist - then you could write about yourself, and…

— Zal Batmanglij

I am not much of a researcher as a novelist; I write mainly from experience.

— Mohsin Hamid