Novelist Quotes

I don't think any novelist should be concerned with literature.

I was going to be a great woman novelist. Then the war came along and I think it's hard for young people today, don't you, to realize that when World War II happened we were dying to go and help our country.

Let's put it this way: if you are a novelist, I think you start out with a 20 word idea, and you work at it and you wind up with a 200,000 word novel. We, picture-book people, or at least I, start out with 200,000 words and I reduce it to 20.

Dostoevski does not tell you what to think about his legend, but he requires that you think about it. The novelist was a deeply religious man and he always thought many readers missed that point about him.

Jane Austen was an extraordinary woman; to actually be able to survive as a novelist in those days - unmarried - was just unheard of.

The fact is that in this day and age I don't think any novelist can assume that a book will get attention.

The novel, for me, was an accident. I really don't consider myself a novelist.

I had thought of writing, actually, and that later on I'd be a novelist.

The artist deals in what cannot be said in words. The artist whose medium is fiction does this in words. The novelist says in words what cannot be said in words.

After I convinced them that I was a harmless novelist, I actually got them to give me a tour of the harem - which is usually off limits for tourists.

But here's the thing: what you do as a screenwriter is you sell your copyright. As a novelist, as a poet, as a playwright, you maintain your copyright.

Historian: an unsuccessful novelist.

The novelist teaches the reader to comprehend the world as a question. There is wisdom and tolerance in that attitude. In a world built on sacrosanct certainties the novel is dead.

Things that appear on the front page of the newspaper as 'fact' are far more dangerous than the games played by a novelist, and can lead to wars.

For a novelist, a given historic situation is an anthropologic laboratory in which he explores his basic question: What is human existence?

A novelist has a specific poetic license which also applies to his own life.

I maintain that if you're a novelist and you go into an art museum, you'll come out a better novelist. And if you paint a picture for an hour you're a better actor at the end of it.

A whim, a passing mood, readily induces the novelist to move hearth and home elsewhere. He can always plead work as an excuse to get him out of the clutches of bothersome hosts.

As a novelist, I tell stories and people give me money. Then financial planners tell me stories and I give them money.

Personally, I have never wished I were a male novelist.

To me, the newspaper business was a way to learn about life and how things worked in the real world and how people spoke. You learn all the skills - you learn to listen, you learn to take notes - everything you use later as a novelist was valuable training in the newspaper world. But I always wanted to write novels.

Every novelist has a different purpose - and often several purposes which might even be contradictory.

I don't really consider myself a novelist, it just came out purely by accident.

I wanted nothing less than to be a fiction writer when I was a kid. If you had told me I would be an artist or novelist when I grew up, I would have laughed in your face.

My temperament is not geared to that of a novelist.

A filmmaker has almost the same freedom as a novelist has when he buys himself some paper.

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

It is not the first duty of the novelist to provide blueprints for insurrection, or uplifting tales of successful resistance for the benefit of the opposition. The naming of what is there is what is important.

The novelist must ground his work in faithful study of human nature.

Well, to be honest I think I'm a better short story writer than a novelist. Novels I find very hard, hours and hours, weeks and weeks, of conscious thought - whereas short stories slip out painlessly in a few days.