Novelist Quotes

If a person is not talented enough to be a novelist, not smart enough to be a lawyer, and his hands are too shaky to perform operations, he becomes a journalist.

All novels are about crime. You'd be hard pressed to find any novel that does not have an element of crime. I don't see myself as a crime novelist, but there are crimes in my books. That's the nature of storytelling, if you want to reflect the real world.

In journalism just one fact that is false prejudices the entire work. In contrast, in fiction one single fact that is true gives legitimacy to the entire work. That's the only difference, and it lies in the commitment of the writer. A novelist can do anything he wants so long as he makes people believe in it.

Among the many problems which beset the novelist, not the least weighty is the choice of the moment at which to begin his novel.

I believe, in a funny way, the job of the novelist is to be out there on the fringes and speaking for an experience that has not really been spoken for.

There's a unique bond of trust between readers and authors that I don't believe exists in any other art form; as a reader, I trust a novelist to give me his or her best effort, however flawed.

The essayist has to follow a certain intellectual pattern. The novelist has the advantage of using fantasy, of being subjective.

One more recent novelist to come along is Cormac McCarthy. Him, I like.

With a novelist, like a surgeon, you have to get a feeling that you've fallen into good hands - someone from whom you can accept the anesthetic with confidence.

I don't like to read novels where the novelist tells me what to think about the situation and the characters. I prefer to discover for myself.

As a novelist, I have a somewhat higher soapbox to stand on than most people do when it comes to talking back to the merchants of fear.

Well I'm not a novelist. I've only written one book and that is a memoir.

I'm not a biographer, I'm a novelist.

To be a novelist, all I need is a pen and a piece of paper.

In effect I am not a novelist, but rather a failed essayist who started to write novels because he didn't know how to write essays.

So, how to stay inside the world of entertainment without actually getting another job? I felt the only logical answer was to become a novelist. So I wrote the first book - driven by some very real feelings of desperation - and it worked.

Yes, but also one of the problems for a novelist in Ireland is the fact that there are no formal manners. I mean some people have beautiful manners but there's no kind of agreed form of manners.

Being a novelist and being a mother have exactly coincided in my life: the call from my agent saying that I had a contract for my first novel - that was on my answering phone message when I got back from the hospital with my first child.

When I'm writing a novel, I'm dealing with a double life. I live in the present at the same time that I live in the past with my characters. It is this that makes a novelist so eccentric and unpleasant.

The novelist must look on humanity without partiality or prejudice. His sympathy, like that of the historian, must be unbounded, and untainted by sect or party.

I thought I wanted to be a journalist or a novelist.

For me, as a beginning novelist, all other living writers form a control group for whom the world is a placebo.

If you are a novelist of a certain type of temperament, then what you really want to do is re-invent the world. God wasn't too bad a novelist, except he was a Realist.

A couple years ago, the novelist Russell Banks told me he was reading the ancient Greek historian Herodotus. I asked why. He said, 'Because I've always wanted to and am tired of having my reading assigned.' I thought it was a marvelous declaration of independence.

I think that if the novel's task is to describe where we find ourselves and how we live now, the novelist must take a good, hard look at the most central facts of contemporary life - technology and science.

You have to go out of your way as a suspense novelist to find situations where the protagonists are somewhat helpless and in real danger.

The economy of a novelist is a little like that of a careful housewife who is unwilling to throw away anything that might perhaps serve its turn.

I'm a big, bombastic novelist and thrill-ride guy. I'm never going to win the National Book Award.

The suspense of a novel is not only in the reader, but in the novelist, who is intensely curious about what will happen to the hero.

The function of the novelist... is to comment upon life as he sees it.