Novelist Quotes: top 100 famous quotes about Novelist

Novelist Quotes & Sayings

Happy to read and share the best inspirational Novelist quotes, sayings and quotations on Wise Famous Quotes.

The job of the novelist is to invent: to embroider, to color, to embellish, to make things up. — Donna Tartt

Trying to outrun the novelist's most insidious enemy, which is doubt. — Stephen King

I am not a political thinker. I'm not even much of a thinker. I'm a hack novelist. — Christopher Buckley

I'm a novelist, so I can't write about ideas unless they're attached to people. — Julian Barnes

A novelist can't be without a kimono and pen!(Shigure) — Natsuki Takaya

They'll say, 'He never recovered from that breakdown and this was the result. It had to be the breakdown
not even he was that dreadful a novelist. — Philip Roth

Do you think that, if I did, I would lead you to the answer inch by inch, like a dramatist or a novelist? — Alexandre Dumas

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

It is not the novelist's job to preach; it is his duty to show. — Anthony Burgess

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

The novelist is more like a pregnant woman who delivers her own child unaided. A messy procedure, with lots of groaning. — David Mitchell

I resist when someone calls me a novelist: it implies some kind of inherent superiority of the novel. I'm not a novelist, I'm a writer. — Aleksandar Hemon

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

Whether he be an original or a plagiarist, man is the novelist of himself. — Jose Ortega Y Gasset

Pundits always have something to write about; the novelist just has a blank screen. — Simon Mawer

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

A novelist's characters must be with him as he lies down to sleep, and as he wakes from his dreams. He must learn to hate them and to love them. — Anthony Trollope

I found it really disturbing to see a novelist writing a diatribe about Islam and Muslim radical extremists, blurring the distinction between the two. — Pankaj Mishra

I'm a competent novelist. I'm getting better. But I'm a really good short story writer. — Tim Pratt

Now that I was a novelist, I could not face the ignominy of failing to produce novels. — Thomas Keneally

A novelist must preserve a childlike belief in the importance of things which common sense considers of no great consequence. — W. Somerset Maugham

Ruth was a novelist, and novelists, Oliver asserted, should have cats and books. — Ruth Ozeki

I think of myself now as a writer, although I wouldn't go as far as to say 'novelist' because that sounds like a Victorian person. — Dawn French

Really, the novelist has the best casting since he doesn't have to cope with the actors and all the rest.
-Alfred Hitchcock — Alfred Hitchcock

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

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. — Philip Roth

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

I was a frustrated musician, frustrated designer, frustrated art director, frustrated novelist, right. I'd fail at all these different professions. — Jeffrey Zeldman

God pity the poor novelist. — Steven Millhauser

Perhaps, after all, the greatest psychologist is not the metaphysician but the novelist. — Walter Besant

A good novelist realizes he is a secretary, not God. — Stephen King

A Clockwork Orange is too didactic to be artistic. It is not the novelist's job to preach; it is his job to show. — Anthony Burgess

The Novelist, afraid his ideas may be foolish, slyly puts them in the mouth of some other fool and reserves the right to disavow them. — Diane Johnson

To tell you the truth. I am a wild and passionate novelist. I am therefore easily given over to telling wild and passionate lies. — Val Edward Simone

I think that at the bottom of all art lies the impulse to preserve. — Philip Larkin

If the memoirist is borrowing narrative techniques from fiction, shouldn't the novelist borrow a few tricks from successful non-fiction? — Darin Strauss

The novelist must be his own most harsh critic and also his own most loving admirer and about both he must say nothing. — Angus Wilson

The novelist, quite rightly, fears the psychoanalyst as both an enemy and a usurper. — Will Self

Nobody asks you to do this. The world out there is not panting after another novelist. We choose it. — Paul Auster

Every 'Observer' writer wants to be a novelist. — Jared Kushner

Literary Irony: A novelist of the paranormal using a ghostwriter. — Michael Kroft

As a young, ambitious novelist, writing for kids never crossed my mind. — Rodman Philbrick

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

I just saw myself as a novelist. — Stephen King

Novelist-Citizen of Two Countries Interpreter of his Generation on both Sides of the Sea. — Henry James

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

Novelist by day; screenwriter by night. — A.D. Posey

As far as he can achieve it, readability is as important for the scientific writer as it is for the novelist. — Donald O. Hebb

If you're a novelist, as I am in real life, you're usually so desperate for any kind of feedback. — Adam Mansbach

I knew I'd always be a second-rate academic, and I thought, 'Well, I'd rather be a second-rate novelist or even a third-rate one'. — Sarah Waters

I guess I've always been an aspiring novelist. I went to Princeton and wrote a novel for my thesis. — Howard Gordon

Eighty-five per cent of what goes on in a novelist's head is none of his business, — Stephen King

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

I consider myself foremost a novelist with the intent of crafting stories that people will remember. — Nicholas Sparks

He was interviewed in the early '60s by a young novelist, Pati Hill. — George Plimpton

I'm a novelist, that's how I make my livelihood, and I concentrate on the novels. — David Mitchell

Personally, I have never wished I were a male novelist. — Curtis Sittenfeld

Was the dividing line between life and fiction as hazy for other people as it was for a writer? — Dean Koontz

For years, I felt I was a novelist, but now I know I can write short fiction. — Jill McCorkle

A novelist who ranks with Proust , Kafka , Musil and his friend James Joyce as one of the enduring pillars of Modernism. — Italo Svevo

I'm a novelist. I think fiction is important or I wouldn't be doing it, but most of it's bad. — Dale Peck

Every author these days is an award-winning novelist. Why? Because they set up an award contest and they dub themselves the winner. — Karen E. Quinones Miller

If you hear voices, you're a lunatic. If you write down what they say, you're an author. — Dani Harper

If you write a screenplay that gets circulated, you have a bigger readership than any literary novelist. And it's an educated audience as well. — William Monahan

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

Freud was just a novelist. — Peter Ackroyd

The reader may not see [these meanings], but they have their effect on him nonetheless. This is the way the modern novelist sinks, or hides his theme — Flannery O'Connor

If you want to be a psychological novelist and write about human beings, the best thing you can do is keep a pair of cats. — Aldous Huxley

A novelist who has to defend his creation by telling a reader *But that's what really happened*, is a novelist who has failed. — Samuel G. Freedman

I would never have been a novelist without working as a psychologist ... it was a great education in human nature. — Jonathan Kellerman

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 guess it's true: it's difficult for men to understand women. — Santonu Kumar Dhar

A friend worth knowing tolerates your flaws while a friend worth keeping loves you in spite of them. — K.E. Garvey

I never had any ambitions to be a novelist. — Haruki Murakami

Yeah, I have the detail-obsessed, controlling personality of a novelist, but I somehow ended up writing plays. — Annie Baker

I was one of those kids who never wanted to be anything but a novelist. And I don't know a lot of people who truly live the life that they dreamed of. — Scott Turow

Moonrise is a fabulous novel and my damn wife wrote it and that's me up there near Highlands shouting it out to the hills. — Pat Conroy

I couldn't have been the novelist I was without being the journalist I was. — Pete Hamill

I think of a designer as a processor of information - like a scriptwriter or a novelist. — Freeman Thomas

Though always frank, the novelist was never wholly sincere. — Julian Barnes

As a journalist I'm asked whether I make things up. As a novelist I'm accused of telling the truth. — Lennox Morrison

As a novelist, I really believe in the power of the precisely chosen word, so all I can say about this news is SHMERGHABERG. — John Green

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

The great novelist vibrated between two decanters with the regularity of a pendulum. — Louisa May Alcott

Listening is crucial for any novelist. Stories & ideas abound. We too often talk about ourselves & block out the richness others may offer. — Mark Rubinstein

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. — E.L. Doctorow

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

Political novels are full of pitfalls, particularly for a novelist with strong political leanings. — Phil Klay

When I started out as a novelist, I thought I was going to be a private-eye writer. That was my intent, and that's what I studied, I mean, scholarly. — Greg Rucka

A novelist is someone who sits around the house all day in his underwear, trying not to smoke. — Scott Spencer

A novelist is really nothing more than an historian of a people who have no history. — Federico Gamboa

The novelist is frequently considered to be an impediment. — Matthew Specktor

A good TV writer needs all the same tricks a good novelist has. — Dean Bakopoulos

The ancient historians gave us delightful fiction in the form of fact; the modern novelist presents us with dull facts under the guise of fiction. — Oscar Wilde

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

I only became a novelist because I thought I had missed my chance to become a historian. — Hilary Mantel

It was probably Chekhov who said that the novelist is not someone who answers questions but someone who asks them. — Haruki Murakami

I would love to see young writers come out of college and know there is a possibility to be a novelist. — Pat Conroy

As a novelist, I'm incredibly lucky to make a living, but that doesn't mean that I don't lie awake at four o'clock in the morning, worrying. — David Nicholls

I'm a novelist. Fortunately I don't have to rule the world. — Salman Rushdie