Accounts Quote by Catherynne M. Valente

All readers come to fiction as willing accomplices to your lies. Such is the basic goodwill contract made the moment we pick up a…

— Steve Almond

“If a novelist were so uncouth and possessed of so little moral sense that he should write of illicit love, his book would be…

— Clyde Brion Davis

Publishers are humane men, and rarely commit crimes. Authors, however, are a hardened set, who usually perpertrate a felony every time they issue a…

— Robert Barr

“Novelists are a special breed. They cannot genuinely trust anything they have not seen with their own eyes or touched with their own hands…

— Haruki Murakami

Novelists are no more moral or certain than anybody else; we are ideologically adrift, and if we are any good then our writing will…

— Andrew O'Hagan

Fiction writers can’t be trusted. They make things up.

— Dan Poynter

Many novels and modern publications are corrupters of morals or distorters of truth.

— Ezra Taft Benson

Novels are fictions and therefore they tell lies, but through those lies every novelist attempts to tell the truth about the world.

— Paul Auster

I don't know if a novelist ever fully detaches him- or herself from what they wrote and the way they wrote it. I can…

— Scott Turow

Writers ought to be regarded as wrongdoers who deserve to be acquitted or pardoned only in the rarest cases: that would be a way…

— Friedrich Nietzsche

“There is only one motive for writing a novel: to be published and read. To me there is no distinction between the mystery novel…

— John Franklin Bardin

Novels should be judged rigorously. Either a book works or it doesn't. The fact that something is true in the real world should not…

— Akhil Sharma