Novelist Quotes - page 2

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

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.

Mary McCarthy

I see myself as a novelist, period. I mean, the material I work with is what is classified as science fiction and fantasy, and I really don't think about these things when I'm writing. I'm just thinking about telling a story and developing my characters.

Roger Zelazny

I'm a novelist, period. An American novelist.

Don DeLillo

The trouble with life (the novelist will feel) is its amorphousness, its ridiculous fluidity. Look at it: thinly plotted, largely themeless, sentimental and ineluctably trite. The dialogue is poor, or at least violently uneven. The twists are either predictable or sensationalist. And it's always the same beginning; and the same ending ...

Martin Amis

The only excuse for a novelist, aside from the entertainment and vicarious living his books give the people who read them, is as a sort of second-class historian of the age he lives in. The "reality" he missed by writing about imaginary people, he gains by being able to build a reality more nearly out of his own factual experience than a plain historian or biographer can.

John Dos Passos

The business of a novelist is, in my opinion, to create characters first and foremost, and then to set them in the snarl of the human currents of his time, so that there results an accurate permanent record of a phase of history.

John Dos Passos

A novelist is a person who lives in other people's skins.

E. L. Doctorow

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

Quentin Tarantino

The business of the novelist is not to relate great events, but to make small ones interesting.

Arthur Schopenhauer

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

The second person to write a story about a young boy and an escaped slave on the Mississippi wasn't a novelist, he was a typist.

Seth Godin

I met, not long ago, a young man who aspired to become a novelist. Knowing that I was in the profession, he asked me to tell him how he should set to work to realize his ambition. I did my best to explain. 'The first thing,' I said, 'is to buy quite a lot of paper, a bottle of ink, and a pen. After that you merely have to write.

Aldous Huxley

Age could not wither nor custom stale her infinite monotony: in fact, neither Age nor Custom could do anything (as they said, their voices rising) with the American novelist Gertrude Johnson.

Randall Jarrell

As a novelist, I feel lucky that I can traffic in nuance. I'm more interested in looking at how things change over time, at how people try and sometimes fail to make meaning out of their lives.

Meg Wolitzer

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.

Norman Spinrad

I've always liked the idea that writing is a form of travel. And I started my writing career as a mystery novelist for adults.

Rick Riordan

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

Sarah Zettel

I used to describe myself as a comic novelist, but my concerns seem to have darkened over the past few years.

Tom Perrotta

As a novelist, where do you go to tap into memories, and impressions, and sensations? It's usually, in my experience, your early life, before you started thinking of yourself as a writer, because somehow those experiences are unadulterated.

William Boyd

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

Life is a very bad novelist. It is chaotic and ludicrous.

Javier Marías

And I didn't grow up wanting to be a director. I grew up wanting to be a writer, so for me, that was always the goal - to be a novelist, not a screenwriter. And I think, again, if I didn't have the novels, maybe I'd be much more frustrated by not having directed yet.

David Benioff

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

Jacqueline Susann

When I was in fourth grade, a novelist came to talk to my English class. She told us that being an author meant sitting at the kitchen table in pajamas, drinking tea with the dogs at your feet.

J. Courtney Sullivan

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