Novelists Quotes - Page 13

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

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

I’ve always said to people, "I don’t care what you call me as long as the checks don’t bounce and the family gets fed." But I never saw myself that way. I just saw myself as a novelist.

Novelists and poets have existed side by side forever.

The great thing about being a novelist is that you organize your own day.

A poet or novelist will invent interruptions to avoid long consecutive days at the ordained page; and of these the most pernicious are other kinds of writing -- articles, lectures, reviews, a wide correspondence.

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.

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

As an historical novelist - there are few jobs more retrospective.

Copywriters, journalists, mainstream authors, ghostwriters, bloggers and advertising creatives have as much right to think of themselves as good writers as academics, poets, or literary novelists.

For a novelist, the gaps in a story are as intriguing as material that still exists.

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

My father was a screenwriter, but he was also a novelist.

Kingsley Amis was one of a trio of brilliant comic novelists who made English literature sparkle in the twentieth century.

Nicholas Sparks recently went on record as saying he is a greater novelist than Cormac McCarthy. This is true in the same sense that I am a better novelist than William Shakespeare.

Not until my middle thirties did I consider myself a novelist.

I think that if the novel's task is to describe where we find ourselves and how we live now, the novelist must take a good, hard look at the most central facts of contemporary life - technology and science.

The idea of being a novelist is really romantic, but it's kind of the same as being president of the United States - it's not gonna happen.

Salvation is an individual relationship with God. I've always considered myself to be a devotional poet, and I consider myself to be a devotional novelist.

I'm easily persuaded that a really good novelist who gets inside somebody else's head could be serving a valuable purpose. I enjoy satirical novels that take a wry, humorous, ironic look at modern life.

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.

Society is the stage on which manners are shown; novels are the literature. Novels are the journal or record of manners; and the new importance of these books derives from the fact, that the novelist begins to penetrate the surface, and treat this part of life more worthily.

I'm a novelist, not a social scientist or a commentator.

The essay is a wonderful medium. I might mention that some writers who longed to be novelists were better as essayists: Sontag, Baldwin, Vidal, Mary McCarthy, Mailer.

Although some people think I am a romantic novelist I have always thought of myself as a rather gritty radical historian.