Novelists Quotes - Page 11

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

Even if I couldn't get my early novels published, I could still write. I went into newspapers, where I got paid to write every day. If there's a better school for would-be novelists, I don't know what it is.

I can be as contrary as I choose.

you're not a bad person because you want to be yourself.

I am a master of fiction. I am also the greatest crime novelist who ever lived. I am to the crime novel in specific what Tolstoy is to the Russian novel and what Beethoven is to music.

You're a wizard, Harry.

Literature has neglected the old and their emotions. The novelists never told us that in love, as in other matters, the young are just beginners and that the art of loving matures with age and experience.

All good novelists have bad memories.

Sometimes I think some of my fellow novelists who have not worked in television and film are very naive about this process. They get an offer and there's the dump truck full of money and they sign it, they cash the check and then they're not involved in the series. They may get invited to the premiere and they come out of the premiere looking like all of their children had just been gassed, with a stunned look on their face because everything has been changed.

Besties before testes.

... the novelist is bound by the reasonable possibilities, not the probabilities, of his culture.

The novelist's--any writer's--object is to whittle down his meaning to the exactest and finest possible point. What, of course, isfatal is when he does not know what he does mean: he has no point to sharpen.

What terrorists gain, novelists lose.

I wrote four novels, but then I realized that the world didn't need me to be a novelist, but the world could use me as a nonfiction writer.

The only true aristocracy is that of consciousness.

Personally, I have never wished I were a male novelist.

Just for the record, she still loves you. She wouldn't bother to torture you if she didn't.

I was writing from the time I was 12 years old, but I originally wanted to be a novelist.

Novelists should never allow themselves to weary of the study of real life.

Human nature provides the lyrics, and we novelists just compose the music.

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.

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.

Lauren Kirshner creates a first-person narrator you never stop rooting for. . . . [Where We Have to Go] highlights Kirshner as a new novelist to watch. A very strong, original debut.

I recognize myself to be an intensely naive person. Most novelists are, despite frequent pretensions to deep socio-political insight.

The novel, for me, was an accident. I really don't consider myself a novelist.