Novelists Quotes · Page 24

Show me a novelist – or, indeed, a reader – who wasn’t a socially awkward, self-conscious adolescent, prone to clumsiness and excessive…

— Charlotte Mendelson

If you write a screenplay that gets circulated, you have a bigger readership than any literary novelist. And it's an educated audience…

— William Monahan

I know to argue against our online lives seems like the argument of the grumpy, old Luddite novelist, but I really always…

— Zadie Smith

I have a wonderful editor who believes in fiction and poetry. She herself is a novelist and poet.

— Frederick Busch

My greatest fear is feeling like a professional novelist. Somebody who creates characters, who sits down and has pieces of paper taped…

— Jonathan Safran Foer

I am worrying about my country. I feel I have a responsibility as a novelist to do something.

— Haruki Murakami

Writing a novel is a very hard thing to do because it covers so long a space of time, and if you…

— Maxwell Perkins

Teaching has ruined more American novelists than drink.

— Gore Vidal

From about ninth grade on, I knew I was a writer at heart. I had fantasies of being a great novelist, but…

— Kevin Maney

To speak today of a famous novelist is like speaking of a famous cabinetmaker or speedboat designer. Adjective is inappropriate to noun.

— Gore Vidal

The biggest downside to being a novelist is writing the novel.

— Jill Barnett

There are many ways of writing badly about painting... There is an 'appreciative' language of threadbare, not inaccurate, but overexposed and irritating…

— A. S. Byatt

There are a lot of historical novelists who do the research about the clothes and maybe even the eating utensils, but they're…

— Edmund White

I am not a psychological novelist, and I try very hard not to allow the reader to see the plight or circumstances…

— Alix Kates Shulman

I always have done work on mythic relations since I started writing. I really want to be a novelist, or at least…

— Marina Warner

I think novelists perform many useful tasks for their fellow citizens, but one of the most valuable is this: to enable us…

— Doris Lessing

I'm a novelist, period. An American novelist.

— Don DeLillo

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

I’ve always thought a novelist only has one character and that is himself or herself.

— John Gregory Dunne

Novelists... fashioning nets to sustain and support the reader as he falls helplessly through the chaos of his own existence.

— Fay Weldon

Novelists have to love humanity to write anything worthwhile. Poets have to love themselves.

— Marita Golden

For me the journey of making a film is a journey of discovery as to what that film is. I mean what…

— Mike Leigh

“Writing - the act of one person giving a piece of their soul to another.”

— Anonymous

The real novelist, the perfectly simple human being, could go on, indefinitely imaging.

— Virginia Woolf

Would-be novelists need to bring equal parts arrogance and ignorance to the task before them. The arrogance is almost self-explanatory. Walk into…

— Laura Lippman