Novelists Quotes

All good novelists have bad memories. What you remember comes out as journalism; what you forget goes into the compost of the imagination.

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.

A very important thing is not to make up your mind that you are any one thing.

America may have great poets and novelists, but she never will have more than one necromancer.

The bad novelist constructs his characters; he directs them and makes them speak. The true novelist listens to them and watches them act; he hears their voices even before he knows them.

Reading is the most rewarding form of exile and the most necessary discipline for novelists who burn with the ambition to get better.

I am. I think. I will.

Novelists tend to go off at 70, and I'm in a funk about it, I've got myself into a real paranoid funk about it, how the talent dies before the body.

A novelist must know what his last chapter is going to say and one way or another work toward that last chapter. ... To me it is utterly basic, yet it seems like it's a great secret.

I'm a natural novelist. I'm interested in the person and the group, and how they mesh. And one of the ways I don't want them to mesh is for the person to be subsumed into the group.

I don't think any novelist should be concerned with literature…literature should be left to essayists.

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

It seemed to me you could do anything in comics. So I started doing my thing, which is mainly influenced by novelists, stand-up comedians, that sort of thing

Teaching has ruined more American novelists than drink.

To speak today of a famous novelist is like speaking of a famous cabinetmaker or speedboat designer. Adjective is inappropriate to noun.

The truth is that I know very few novelists who have been satisfied with the adaptation of their books for the screen.

An urban novelist never minds a little decay.

I know to argue against our online lives seems like the argument of the grumpy, old Luddite novelist, but I really always try to make the argument from the perspective of personal pleasure.

A movie will do in one second, with one image, what it will take a novelist at least a page to describe.

And that singular anomaly, the lady novelist-- I don't think she'd be missed--I'm sure she'd not be missed!

I am a huge fan of Alan Furst. Furst is the best in the business--the most talented espionage novelist of our generation.

Think about what artists, novelists and poets have in common: the ability to engage in metaphorical thinking, linking seemingly unrelated ideas, such as, 'It is the east, and Juliet is the Sun.'

The artist deals with 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.

I'm mostly a novelist these days, but I have written short stories in Fantasy, Science Fiction and horror.

How can we expect novelists to be moral, when their trade forces them to treat every end they meet as no more than an imperfect means to a novel?

We live in an age in which the imagination of the novelist is helpless against what he knows he is going to read in tomorrow's newspaper.

It is fatal to know too much at the outcome: boredom comes as quickly to the traveler who knows his route as to the novelist who is over certain of his plot.

I meet kids now who become novelists, poets, write for the theater and movies, who were simply inspired by what they saw during the Spoleto Festival.

I get work because I'm primarily a novelist but I've become script doctor. I can work back and forth between French and English.

I don't get involved in casting, budgets, location or promotion. Just the script. And, of course, the promotional tour. Which is fine with me - I'm a novelist.

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.

Lawrence Kelter is an exciting new novelist, who reminds me of an early Robert Ludlum.

All gods are better than their reputation.

Short-story writing requires an exquisite sense of balance. Novelists, frankly, can get away with more. A novel can have a dull spot or two, because the reader has made a different commitment.

I never met anybody in my life who says, I want to be a critic. People want to be a fireman, poet, novelist.

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

A historian may be an artist too, and a novelist is a historian, the preserver, the keeper, the expounder, of human experience.

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

Poets and novelists and playwrights make themselves, against terrible resistances, give over what the rest of us keep safely locked within our hearts.

There seems almost a general wish of descrying the capacity and undervaluing the labour of the novelist, and of slighting the performances which have only genius, wit, and taste to recommend them.

The most original novelist now writing in English.

A woman filled with faith in the one she loves is the creation of a novelist's imagination.

Universities are filled with poets and novelists conducting demure and careful lives in imitation of Eliot and Forster and those others who (through what seems to be have been discretion) made it.

Southerners make good novelists: they have so many stories because they have so much family.

The materials of the novelist must be real; they must be gathered from the field of humanity by his actual observation.

Miss Austen had shown the infinite possibilities of ordinary and present things for the novelist.

San Francisco has long been a leader in the arts, nurturing generations of painters, sculptors, poets, novelists, playwrights, film-makers, and performing artists and innovators of every kind.

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.

Great sorrow or great joy should bring intense hunger--not abstinence from food, as our novelists will have it.

The novelist works neither to correct nor to condone, not at all to comfort, but to make what's told alive.