Just as we bemoan the passing away of the Great Novel, a great novelist is likely to emerge, perhaps even from Denmark… — J. M. Coetzee Copy Share Image
I want to be a popular novelist who's also serious, or a serious novelist who's also very accessible. — Douglas Kennedy Copy Share Image
They can't yank a novelist like they can a pitcher. A novelist has to go the full nine, even if it kills… — Ernest Hemingway Copy Share Image
“The difference between a novelist and a historian is this: that the former tells lies deliberately and for the fun of it;… — Halldor Laxness Copy Share Image
Why does any novelist keep writing long after they've made money? Because they've failed to write the perfect novel. — Ian Rankin Copy Share Image
I was directed because I knew I wanted to be a novelist, but I didn't have a very good job or a… — Jeffrey Eugenides Copy Share Image
“Passionate attraction to someone of the opposite sex will make a hero or a fool of a novelist each time.” — Roman Payne Copy Share Image
I always think the novelist should go to the culture's dark places and poke around. Pose a lot of hard questions. — Dana Spiotta Copy Share Image
For the first-time novelist you've got to get up at 5:30 in the morning and write until 7, make breakfast and go… — Ridley Pearson Copy Share Image
“A warm sunny evening, the plash and gurgle of the waves in the rock pools, the rush of the cold gin. I… — William Boyd Copy Share Image
After writing a novel, what is there to say? If a novelist could say it in a maxim, they wouldn't need 120,000… — Richard Flanagan Copy Share Image
Well, to be honest I think I'm a better short story writer than a novelist. Novels I find very hard, hours and… — Eric Brown Copy Share Image
As a poet or a novelist or a painter, you are pushing yourself all the time, always looking for a new way… — Paul Auster Copy Share Image
Radio is the medium that most closely approximates the experience of reading. As a novelist, I find it very exciting to be… — Daniel Alarcon Copy Share Image
I feel very strongly that where the facts exist, a historical novelist should use them if they're writing about a person who… — Alison Weir Copy Share Image
“The art lies in setting the inner life into the most violent motion with the smallest possible expenditure of outer life; for… — Arthur Schopenhauer Copy Share Image
To a novelist, fluidity is the ultimate good omen; suddenly difficult problems are simply solved, intractable structural knots loosen themselves, and you… — Zadie Smith Copy Share Image
I think that if the novel's task is to describe where we find ourselves and how we live now, the novelist must… — Richard Powers Copy Share Image
As a novelist, your impulse is toward multiplicity: multiple voices, multiple perceptions, multiple nuances, the ambiguity in human communication. Fiction really is… — Pankaj Mishra Copy Share Image
I stopped performing because I don't have the temperament of a performer. You have to want to do the same thing over… — Tom Lehrer Copy Share Image
“It takes three or four years before the present day sinks in to you as a novelist. It has not just to… — Martin Amis Copy Share Image
When I was 30 or so - by that time I had become an assistant D.A. - I decided I would try… — William Landay Copy Share Image
There ought to be more grants that go to people in their late twenties and early thirties. That's a crucial age, although… — Edmund White Copy Share Image
“I bleed words. I dream in narrative. I live in infinite worlds. I befriend figmental characters. I wish on stars in other… — Richelle E. Goodrich Copy Share Image
Sometimes someone will tell me about an author I've never heard of before and that will send me to that person. That's… — Stephen Dobyns Copy Share Image
Novelists are perhaps the last people in the world to be entrusted with opinions. The nature of a novel is that it… — Anthony Burgess Copy Share Image
A novelist writes a novel, and people read it. But reading is a solitary act. While it may elicit a varied and… — August Wilson 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
It can be dismaying, all the same, for a novelist to compare the slowness of the writing with the speed of the… — Graham Swift Copy Share Image
To me, the newspaper business was a way to learn about life and how things worked in the real world and how… — Carl Hiaasen 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
“Reading is a full contact sport; we crash up against the wave of words with all of our intellectual, imaginative, and emotional… — Thomas C. Foster 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
Let's put it this way: if you are a novelist, I think you start out with a 20 word idea, and you… — Eric Carle Copy Share Image
There's a curious knot that binds novelists and terrorists...Years ago I used to think it was possible for a novelist to alter… — Don DeLillo Copy Share Image
Like every novelist, I fantasise about film. Novelists are not equipped to make a movie, in my opinion. They make their own… — John le Carre Copy Share Image
“Being a novelist is not the sort of thing we can shut off. It infests every bit of us until we lose… — Thomm Quackenbush Copy Share Image
A novelist's lack of awareness of and critical distance to his own body of work is due to a phenomenon that I… — Patrick Modiano Copy Share Image
Years ago I used to think it was possible for a novelist to alter the inner life of the culture. Now bomb-makers… — Don Delillo Copy Share Image
“I know you would be watching over me all through this journey called life... whenever I look next to me, I feel… — Santonu Kumar Dhar Copy Share Image
