Novelists Quotes - Page 16

My job as the novelist is to present the whole case, then the reader gets to render her verdict.

I am a better novelist than a poet, playwright, or essayist.

Whether he be an original or a plagiarist, man is the novelist of himself.

I'm a novelist, I'm not an activist. I'm not a non-fiction writer, I'm not a journalist. I'm not a foodie, I'm not even really an animal person, or an environmentalist. I did the best I could with this, but it's not who I am.

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

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.

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

We may, without offending any laws of good taste, require of an architect, as we do of a novelist, that he should be not only correct, but entertaining.

I'm a very old-fashioned novelist. I write 19th-century novels, where a lot of rules apply.

There is a part of me in every character, naturally. That's why novelists rarely write good autobiographies. You start one and it becomes another novel.

If you are a novelist of a certain type of termperament, then what you really want to do is re-invent the world. God wasn't too bad a novelist except he was a Realist.

The novel is resilient, and so are novelists.

Dostoevsky is such a bad writer it is hard to take him seriously as a novelist, though he is a wonderful philosopher.

You get spoiled as a novelist because you get to be the director and the editor, and you play all the parts, but as a screenwriter, you are a bit down the ladder.

The biggest downside to being a novelist is writing the novel.

Because I'm a novelist, I think in terms of structure. The way I keep going is through structure. It's what inspires me and pushes me through.

Being a novelist is hard for anyone - male or female. You don't get to quit your day job.

Some Pulitzer winners - novelists - have confided to me that getting the prize screwed them up. It messed with their heads. That hasn't been my experience.

Novelists are always resisting autobiographical readings of their work, because they know how false those can be.

Every novelist should possess a hermaphroditic imagination.

A novelist is on the cusp between someone who knows everything and someone who knows nothing.

Novelists of a conservative or more purely aesthetic bent hold up better on the surface, but their novels go in and out of fashion according to relevance or irrelevance.

Novelists never have to footnote.

Morality for the novelist is expressed not so much in the choice of subject matter as in the plot of the narrative, which is perhaps why in our morally bewildered time novelists have often been timid about plot.

The best of our fiction is by novelists who allow that it is as good as they can give, and the worst by novelists who maintain that they could do much better if only the public would let them.