Chance Quote by Jane Smiley

We postpone our literary work until we have more ripeness and skill to write, and we one day discover that our literary talent wasa…

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

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

There have always been revivals. Some have always been successful. And many of them have failed.

— Harold Prince

Good writers are of necessity rare.

— George Henry Lewes

In the end, of course, all novelists will be judged by their novels, but let's not forget that we will also need new ways…

— Pankaj Mishra

History proves that most writers get forgotten anyway. That's very likely to happen to my books, and if I'm extremely lucky, maybe one of…

— Michel Faber

For a true writer each book should be a new beginning where he tries again for something that is beyond attainment. He should always…

— Ernest Hemingway

“Each literature bears its freight of the eclipsed; each generation shows us writers in the process of disappearing.”

— Keith Botsford

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

— Vladimir Nabokov

There are a million talented writers who are unpublished only because they stop writing when it gets hard.

— Gillian Flynn

“A writer doesn't dream of riches and fame, though those things are nice. A true writer longs to leave behind a piece of themselves,…

— CK Webb

Not all popular novelists are good, but all good novelists are, sooner or later, popular.

— Dean Koontz