Novelists Quotes - Page 20

Henry James claim that if you want to be a novelist you should be somebody on whom nothing is lost.

I know I'm a rare person, a trained scientist who writes fiction, because so few contemporary novelists engage with science.

The artist deals with what cannot be said in words. The novelist says in words what cannot be said in words.

If I actually believed that the progress of human understanding depended on our crop of contemporary novelists, I would shoot myself.

I do think there's some aspect of being a novelist that is a little crazy making.

I always wanted to be a fiction writer, but I couldn't figure out how you could be a novelist and make any money, which continues to be a problem for novelists the world over.

The novelist does not long to see the lion eat grass. He realizes that one and the same God created the wolf and the lamb, then smiled, “seeing that his work was good.”

As a novelist, you deepen your characters as you go, adding layers. As a reporter, you try to peel layers away: observing subjects enough to get beneath the surface, re-questioning a source to find the facts. But these processes aren't so different.

RICE-WATER, n. A mystic beverage secretly used by our most popular novelists and poets to regulate the imagination and narcotize the conscience.

I realized that my identity as a novelist was private. Only I knew how much of a novelist I was!

Drawing Dead is a brilliant noir from one of Australia's most exciting new novelists.

I hated being a novelist when I was 20 - I had nothing to write about.

I am not an academic who happens to have written a novel. I am a novelist who happens to be quite good academically.