Novelists Quotes · Page 9

Every child has the capacity to be everything.

— Doris Lessing

Outcasts may grow up to be novelists and filmmakers and computer tycoons, but they will never be the athletic ruling class.

— Chuck Klosterman

Was our life nothing more than a sequence of anonymous screams in a desert of indifferent stars?

— Ernesto Sabato

Of Dickens' style it is impossible to speak in praise. It is jerky, ungrammatical, and created by himself in defiance of rules...…

— Anthony Trollope

Selfish men make the best lovers. They're prepared to invest in the women's pleasures so that they can collect an even bigger…

— J. G. Ballard

I think most novelists I know, certainly including me, feel the novels choose them rather than vice-versa.

— Steve Erickson

I'm a novelist, and idle speculation is what novelists do. How odd to spend one's life trying to pretend that non-existent people…

— Margaret Atwood

You get spoiled as a novelist because you get to be the director and the editor, and you play all the parts,…

— Jo Nesbo

Canada has one great novelist (Robertson Davies), which means it has one for every twenty-five million citizens - the world's highest ratio.

— George Will

I met, not long ago, a young man who aspired to become a novelist. Knowing that I was in the profession, he…

— Aldous Huxley

More than anything I am a novelist. But for me, an author's job is not only to create linguistically accomplished works. As…

— Orhan Pamuk

Not until my middle thirties did I consider myself a novelist.

— Rita Mae Brown

I don't think any novelist should be concerned with literature…literature should be left to essayists.

— Jacqueline Susann

Novelists, it seems to me, are the very last people who should be asked to comment on the news of the day,…

— Hilary Mantel

Be careful what you wish for, you may receive it.

— Anonymous

The difference between a novelist and someone who tinkers around with writing is this: novelists finish their books.

— Nancy Etchemendy

A critical assumption is sometimes made that [Grisham, Clancey, Crichton & myself] have access to some mystical vulgate that other (and often…

— Stephen King

Novelists are always resisting autobiographical readings of their work, because they know how false those can be.

— Jeffrey Eugenides

The greatest benefit we owe to the artist, whether painter, poet, or novelist, is the extension of our sympathies.

— George Eliot

I became fascinated by the fact that people write to give away rather than write to be read. It's the difference between…

— David Suchet

Nothing becomes reality in the political life of a nation that was not present in its literature as spirit.

— Hugo von Hofmannsthal

In my view, the novelist has no right to express his opinions on the things of this world. In creating, he must…

— Gustave Flaubert

Sometimes I wonder why I'm a novelist right now. There is no definite career reason why I became a writer. Something happened,…

— Haruki Murakami

Intensely vivid characters, terrible crimes, and a brutal deep-frozen landscape all prove beyond a reasonable doubt that cold nurtures good and evil…

— Lee Child

Writing [for the novelist] is not an activity, but a condition. That is why one simply can't resume the work when one…

— Robert Musil