Arcs Quote by Martin Amis

The business of a novelist is, in my opinion, to create characters first and foremost, and then to set them in the snarl of…

— John Dos Passos

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

“I am certain that a novelist is someone who attributes a different reality-value to the characters and events of his story than to those…

— Alain Robbe-Grillet

I think novelists, when they write their books, end up having occasionally serving a purpose and playing roles that they never really fully either…

— Khaled Hosseini

What's not realized about good novelists is that they're as competitive as good athletes. They study each other - where the other person is…

— Norman Mailer

All novelists must form their personal pacts in some way with the slowness of their craft. There are some who demand of themselves a…

— Graham Swift

The career of a writer is comparable to that of a woman of easy virtue. You write first for pleasure, later for the pleasure…

— Marcel Achard

I think it's quite difficult to understand what kind of life a writer leads. They might be millionaires, or they might be starving people.

— Kazuo Ishiguro

I think a novelist must be more tender with living or 'real' people. The moral imperative of having been entrusted with their story looms…

— Rick Bass

The novelist is the person who spends a lot of his or her day thinking about the human drama and emotional complexity.

— Thane Rosenbaum

Novels are one of the few remaining areas of narrative storytelling where one person does almost all of the creative heavy lifting.

— Charles Stross

Novelist time is reptile time; novelists tend to be ruminant and brooding, nursers of ancient grievances, second-guessers, Tuesday afternoon quarterbacks, retrospectators, endlessly, like slumping…

— Michael Chabon