Novelists Quotes - Page 12

Novelists who get shitty about screenwriting invariably can't do it, or they can't hack it in the world of what's really, in truth, very bold and very public enterprise.

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.

For me, film has been good because I'm able to work at top crack, working at something I love to do, in the only literary form in which you can still make money. There are no famous novelists, not as novelists used to be famous.

I assume that - because you can get degrees in journalism from very reputable universities - I assume that people can be trained to be journalists. I've never been entirely certain that anyone can be trained to be a novelist in the same way.

I started writing short fiction very briefly, as I imagine is the case for some novelists.

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

Just as the painter thinks with his brush and paints the novelist thinks with his story.

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

A novelist is, like all mortals, more fully at home on the surface of the present than in the ooze of the past.

The memoirist, like the poet and the novelist, must engage the world, because engagement makes experience, experience makes wisdom, and finally it's the wisdom-or rather the movement toward it-that counts.

Among the many problems which beset the novelist, not the least weighty is the choice of the moment at which to begin his novel.

I am the luckiest novelist in the world. I was a first-time novelist who wasn't awash in rejection slips, whose manuscript didn't disappear in slush piles. I have had a wonderful time.

I am a novelist at heart.

The makers of the short story have rarely been good novelists.

It is less the business of the novelist to tell us what happened than to show how it happened.

Predictions are uttered by prophets (free of charge); by clairvoyants (who usually charge a fee, and are therefore more honored in their day than prophets); and by futurologists (salaried). Prediction is the business of prophets, clairvoyants, and futurologists. It is not the business of novelists. A novelist's business is lying.

Most novelists write about twisted lives.

The lesson you have to learn as novelist is how to be collaborative, and how to say, "I don't get to dictate this."

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

The novelist is more a marathon runner than long-distance runner and the kind of courage it takes working in such isolation cannot be underestimated. I really respect my fellow writers on this front.

For purposes of marketing, writers are designated as poets, novelists, or something else. But writing is about matchmaking, an attempt to marry sensations with apt words.

The novelist can't successfully depict such horrifying reality. But she can, and must, try, to bear witness. There are many ways of doing this; the mode I prefer is indirect.

The novelists of the nineteeth century had all the luck. They had a huge and easily pleased public and the world they surveyed had every appearance of permanence.

Novelists who treat violence and cruelty as something to be exploited for their effect, or to enjoy the pleasure of an evacuation, are carriers of a singularly unpleasant disease.

The writer - more especially the novelist - who has not, at one moment or another, considered his publisher unworthy of him, has still to be conceived.