Novelist Quotes · Page 6

I like to think of myself as an unmediated novelist - or perhaps a national novelist.

— E. L. Doctorow

The novelist, quite rightly, fears the psychoanalyst as both an enemy and a usurper.

— Will Self

A novelist needs to know his own strong points and weak points.

— David Mitchell

The novelist teaches the reader to comprehend the world as a question,

— Milan Kundera

“A novelist is a doctor who sees only terminal cases.”

— John Irving

I was writing from the time I was 12 years old, but I originally wanted to be a novelist.

— Christopher McQuarrie

Whether he be an original or a plagiarist, man is the novelist of himself.

— Jose Ortega y Gasset

For a novelist, it's kind of an onerous burden to represent an entire culture.

— Khaled Hosseini

I have tried very hard as a novelist to say, 'Novels are about individuals and especially larger than life individuals.'

— Bharati Mukherjee

A novelist has two lives-- a reading and writing life, and a lived life. he or she cannot be understood at all…

— Jane Smiley

A novelist is, like all mortals, more fully at home on the surface of the present than in the ooze of the…

— Vladimir Nabokov

I'm always determined that as a novelist I'm going to go out there and research my characters very thoroughly before I start…

— Chris Cleave

I think it's restrictive to typecast myself as a novelist because I enjoy other forms of expression. I love literature and I…

— Julia Leigh

The only way to be a novelist, to think that you can create something others will give themselves up to for a…

— Nicola Griffith

I think back on that day when 16-year-old me scribbled on some silly piece of paper for some long-forgotten high school career-day…

— Sarah MacLean

The fact is that in this day and age I don't think any novelist can assume that a book will get attention.

— Curtis Sittenfeld

The better you know someone, the less well you often see them (and the less well they can therefore be transferred into…

— Julian Barnes

Science fiction is a literary field crowded with strong opinions, and no SF novelist delivered himself more memorably of his views -…

— Paul Di Filippo

Like most novelists, I like to do exactly the opposite of what I'm told. It's in my nature as a novelist. Novelists…

— Haruki Murakami

The novelist's--any writer's--object is to whittle down his meaning to the exactest and finest possible point. What, of course, isfatal is when…

— Elizabeth Bowen

“And once the novelist has brought us to this state, in which, as in all purely mental states, every emotion is multiplied…

— Marcel Proust

I don't think I knew that you could be a novelist. I think a lot of my students are in the same…

— Rachel Cusk

As a novelist, you deepen your characters as you go, adding layers. As a reporter, you try to peel layers away: observing…

— Amy Waldman

“The only real people are the people who never existed, and if a novelist is base enough to go to life for…

— Oscar Wilde

I'm a novelist, that's how I make my livelihood, and I concentrate on the novels.

— David Mitchell

“As a historical novelist, there are few jobs more retrospective.”

— Sara Sheridan

A novelist has a specific poetic license which also applies to his own life.

— Jerzy Kosinski

“Perhaps, after all, the greatest psychologist is not the metaphysician but the novelist.”

— Walter Besant

The job of the novelist is to invent: to embroider, to color, to embellish, to make things up.

— Donna Tartt

The novelist helps us to see things we might not notice otherwise.

— Madeleine L'Engle

I had thought of writing, actually, and that later on I'd be a novelist.

— Francois Truffaut

My dad was very successful as a journalist, so I didn't want to be one. I wanted to be a novelist.

— Giles Coren

Two things a novelist can do with a hat: Talk through it or pull a rabbit from it.

— Peter S. Prescott

When I was a child, I loved making stories, so I thought maybe I would be a novelist.

— Hirokazu Kore-eda

“I realised early on that being an author is a hugely misunderstood job.”

— Sara Sheridan

A Christian novelist tries to describe the world as it is.

— John Updike

As a novelist, I remain interested in the notion of a single reckless act and its consequences.

— Anita Shreve

Pundits always have something to write about; the novelist just has a blank screen.

— Simon Mawer

A novelist has to know enough about a subject to fool the passenger next to him on an airplane.

— David Foster Wallace

I don't really consider myself a novelist, it just came out purely by accident.

— Wole Soyinka