Novelists Quotes: top 100 famous quotes about Novelists

Novelists Quotes & Sayings

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

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. — Pat Conroy

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

Where does any novelist pick up any character? For the most part, in town, to be sure. — Herman Melville

Novelists have always had complete freedom to pretty much tell their story any way they saw fit. And that's what I'm trying to do. — Quentin Tarantino

Being an unpublished novelist has about as much social acceptability as being a shopping bag lady. — James Frey

But she had a lively acquaintaince with confinement through the works of women novelists, especially those of the unmarried ones. — Stella Gibbons

When the future looks dark, do not panic, because future does not exist yet; by using your intelligence, you can always turn it to bright! — Mehmet Murat Ildan

One must not put trust in novelists, Beth; they create worlds to fit their own needs and drive their characters mad in doing it. — Mary Robinette Kowal

Novelists never have to footnote. — Jane Smiley

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

Being called a 'bad citizen' is a compliment to a novelist, at least to my mind. That's exactly what we ought to do. — Don DeLillo

You could say that all novels are spy novels and all novelists are spy masters. — Ian McEwan

We crime novelists have a great pulpit. We write about justice and about correcting injustice. — Jesse Kellerman

Sometimes I think that novelists suffer from P.C.S.: Perpetual Childhood Syndrome. — Simon Mawer

Really there was no deadlier combination than bookworm and megalomaniac. It was, for example, the crazed condition of many novelists and travelers. — Paul Theroux

We all steal," Standerson said. "The trick is to steal from regular people, not other novelists. — Scott Westerfeld

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

Whatever fame a novelist my attain, it's always kind of an anonymous one. I can go anywhere, and no one knows who I am ... — Jonathan Kellerman

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

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

While victors may get to write history, novelists get to write/right reality. — M.T. Bass

If you tell a novelist, 'Life's not like that', he has to do something about it. The poet simply replies, 'No, but I am.' — Philip Larkin

I saw novelists as being admirable people and I thought ... I thought ... maybe, one day, I could be one of them. — Michael Palin

It is not the office of a novelist to show us how to behave ourselves; it is not the business of fiction to teach us anything. — Agnes Repplier

Novelists don't normally write about what's going on; they write about what's not going on. — Martin Amis

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

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

The novelist uses facts to create a fiction about life. The pornographer uses sexual reality to create sexual illusion. — Marty Rubin

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

The novelist is bound by the reasonable possibilities, not the probabilities, of his culture. — Flannery O'Connor

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

I thought of happy endings, how novelists usually flinched. To admit your characters are doomed means you are too. — Darcey Steinke

There are many reasons why novelists write but they all have one thing in common a need to create an alternative world. — John Fowles

The most original novelist now writing in English. — Ivy Compton-Burnett

To ask a novelist to talk about his novels is like asking somebody to cook about their dancing. — Jim Crace

Novelists get to direct the perfect films. We get to cast every part. We dress the set exactly as we wish. — Jonathan Lethem

You tell me your favorite novelists and I'll tell you whom you vote for, or whether you vote at all. — Stephen Vizinczey

The difference between a novelist and someone who tinkers around with writing is this: novelists finish their books. — Nancy Etchemendy

Poets don't run out of material the way novelists do because they don't depend on material in the same way. — Julian Barnes

Every novelist should write something for children at least once in his lifetime. — Henryk Sienkiewicz

Novelists are stamina merchants, grinders, nine-to-fivers, and their career curves follow the usual arc of human endeavour. — Martin Amis

He was after all, a novelist ... and a novelist was simply a fellow who got paid to tell lies. The bigger the lies, the better the pay. — Stephen King

Proust was the greatest novelist of the twentieth century, just as Tolstoy was in the nineteenth. — Marcel Proust

The passion for fact in a raw state is a peculiarity of the novelist. — Mary McCarthy

Novelists embody plural selves all the time. What are characters, after all, if not other selves? — Siri Hustvedt

Drawing Dead is a brilliant noir from one of Australia's most exciting new novelists. — Adrian McKinty

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

All good novelists have bad memories. — Graham Greene

All novelists write in a different way, but I always write in longhand and then do two versions of typescript on a computer. — Martin Amis

I am looking for the novelists whose writing is an extension of their intellect rather than an extension of their neurosis. — Tom Robbins

Novelists can ask - they can ask for anything - but their books are their answers in advance. — Joshua Cohen

In Hollywood, they think they know it all. You, as a writer, are essentially an outsider. Novelists and short-story writers, especially. — Ray Bradbury

The great novelists are philosophical novelists
that is, the contrary of thesis-writers. — Albert Camus

Some novelists want to give people in history a voice because they have been denied it in the past. — Antony Beevor

God gets the great stories. Novelists must make do with more mundane fictions. — Richard Flanagan

It is in their 'good' characters that novelists make, unawares, the most shocking self- revelations. — C.S. Lewis

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

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

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

The makers of the short story have rarely been good novelists. — V.S. Pritchett

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

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

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

I think, in common with a lot of novelists, I wasn't the most athletic guy at school. — Chris Cleave

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

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

Great novelists are philosopher-novelists who write in images instead of arguments. — Albert Camus

What the best novels and novelists do is to offer a different way of seeing. — Aminatta Forna

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

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

The novel is resilient, and so are novelists. — John Banville

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

I know I'm a rare person, a trained scientist who writes fiction, because so few contemporary novelists engage with science. — Barbara Kingsolver

He was a moth to her flame, a marshmallow to her campfire, a redneck to her bottle rocket ... — Nine Naughty Novelists

Junior writers $300; Minor poets - $500 a week; Broken novelists - $850-1000; One play dramatists - $1500; Sucks - $2000. Wits - $2500. — F Scott Fitzgerald

The writing talent of Edinburgh is textured - we have poets, novelists, non-fiction writers, dramatists and more. — Sara Sheridan

Crime novelists do really well with Los Angeles. — Janet Fitch

To be motivated to write a novel, I need to be unable not to write. — Johnny Rich

Try everything; listen to everyone. Follow no one. You are your own story guru! — Jeff Lyons

Novelists are evil psychopomps, basically. We treat a few characters as real, but the rest of them are cannon fodder. — Scott Westerfeld

I like novelists who can create other interesting worlds. — Kazuo Ishiguro

Once upon a time, novelists of the 19th century, such as Charles Dickens, published in serial form. — Margaret Atwood

RICE-WATER, n. A mystic beverage secretly used by our most popular novelists and poets to regulate the imagination and narcotize the conscience. — Ambrose Bierce

Every novelist should possess a hermaphroditic imagination. — Jeffrey Eugenides

By measuring individual human worth, the novelist reveals the full enormity of the State — Ian McEwan

They can't yank a novelist like they can a pitcher. A novelist has to go the full nine, even if it kills him. — Ernest Hemingway,

All novelists should live in two different worlds: a real one and an unreal one. — John Fowles

Teaching has ruined more American novelists than drink. — Gore Vidal

The historian records, but the novelist creates. — E. M. Forster

What a crazy artist this evolution is! Watch the little cats playing; they are the crazy works of the evolution! — Mehmet Murat Ildan

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

At the meeting you behaves exactly as Marathi novelists of the last century tell is husbands do in sari shops. — Sachin Kundalkar

I just saw myself as a novelist. — Stephen King

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

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

I think most novelists I know, certainly including me, feel the novels choose them rather than vice-versa. — Steve Erickson

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