Novelists should never allow themselves to weary of the study of real life. — Charlotte Bronte Copy Share Image
Novelists tell that piece of truth hidden at the bottom of every lie. — Italo Calvino Copy Share Image
I sometimes think novelists write about sex in order to avoid boring themselves to death. — Walker Percy Copy Share Image
I suppose I am a born novelist, for the things I imagine are more vital and vivid to me than the things… — Ellen Glasgow 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 Electroshock Novelist: The Alluring Bad Boy of Literary England Has Always Been Fascinated by Britain's Dustbin Empire. Now Martin Amis Takes… — Sam Tanenhaus Copy Share Image
Novelists are stamina merchants, grinders, nine-to-fivers, and their career curves follow the usual arc of human endeavour. — Martin Amis Copy Share Image
It may be time for serious literary novelists to take back some of the subject matter we abandoned to hack novelists and… — Scott Spencer Copy Share Image
The novelist does not long to see the lion eat grass. He realizes that one and the same God created the wolf… — Andre Gide Copy Share Image
A woman filled with faith in the one she loves is the creation of a novelist's imagination. — Honore de Balzac Copy Share Image
Slowly, after dozens of rejection slips and failures and false starts and postponed dreams - what Langston Hughes called dreams deferred -… — Anne Lamott Copy Share Image
People in a novel can be understood completely by the reader, if the novelist can be understood completely by the reader, if… — E. M. Forster Copy Share Image
Rules such as "Write what you know," and "Show, don't tell," while doubtlessly grounded in good sense, can be ignored with impunity… — Tom Robbins Copy Share Image
I have argued about the future of fiction with jaded novelists, far-seeing postmodernists, technologists, television critics. The argument that future generations will… — Russell Smith 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
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
Life will break you. Nobody can protect you from that, and living alone won't either, for solitude will also break you with… — Louise Erdrich Copy Share Image
It's like a novelist writing far out things. If it makes a point and makes sense, then people like to read that.… — Johnny Cash Copy Share Image
There are novels that end well, but in between there are human beings acting like human beings. And human beings are not… — Margaret Atwood Copy Share Image
Political thriller? International thriller? Financial thriller? Whatever you call it, The Ascendant is smart, edgy, fast-paced storytelling at its best. Its unlikely… — Alafair Burke Copy Share Image
I read not so long ago about the construction of a large telescope in Chile's Atacama Desert, where rainfall can average a… — Brad Leithauser Copy Share Image
We tend to overestimate what we can do in a short period, and underestimate what we can do over a long period,… — Gretchen Rubin Copy Share Image
My only passions were books and music. As you might guess, I led a lonely life… Not that I knew what I… — Haruki Murakami Copy Share Image
“Novelists congratulate themselves on their creation of this kind of “character” or that kind of “character,” and readers pretend to talk knowingly… — Sōseki Natsume Copy Share Image
Novels are political not because writers carry party cards -- some do, I do not -- but because good fiction is about… — Orhan Pamuk Copy Share Image
For me, it is about using everything that is there and using the gaps in the record, figuring out why the gaps… — Hilary Mantel Copy Share Image
The novel, for me, was an accident. I really don't consider myself a novelist. — Wole Soyinka Copy Share Image
It is better to write a bad first draft than to write no first draft at all. — Will Shetterly Copy Share Image
A pornographic novelist is one who exploits the sexual instinct as a prostitute does. A legitimate sex novel elucidates it or brings… — George Bernard Shaw 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
