19th century Quote by John Irving

I'd never written a novel before, and I wrote a novel, and that turned out OK.

— Rainbow Rowell

Wrote my first "novel" when I was six. Studied a bit in college, but then pursued history... But when I started writing professionally, it…

— David B. Coe

I read mostly fiction, a lot of 19th-century novels.

— Ken Follett

I always wrote as a vehicle for expression but did not try writing for publication until my mid-thirties, at which time I started writing…

— Elizabeth Berg

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

— Don DeLillo

I'm a professional. So before I published any novels, I'd always been writing stories.

— Jess Walter

I only published my first novel at the age of 40. Till then, I wrote short stories.

— A. B. Yehoshua

I am almost six-novels-old. It took me until the third novel to call myself a writer.

— Manju Kapur

I am not an academic who happens to have written a novel. I am a novelist who happens to be quite good academically.

— A. S. Byatt

I lay off a lot modern fiction and only rely on living writers for non-fiction work.

— Henry Rollins

I've always written a little bit. I mean, I've written screenplays, and I've doctored my dialogue for years, and I've written speeches - I…

— Rob Lowe

I always wanted to write novels, even before I had read a lot of novels or had a very good idea of what they…

— Elif Batuman