Novelists Quotes - Page 3

I was given a dictionary when I was seven, and I read it because I had nothing else to read. I read it the way you read a book.

I would like to spend the rest of my days in a place so silent–and working at a pace so slow–that I would be able to hear myself living.

You have to say I am forgiven again and again until it becomes the story you believe about yourself.

While the novelist is banging on his typewriter, the poet is watching a fly in the windowpane.

Life is a very bad novelist. It is chaotic and ludicrous.

The novelist must be his own most harsh critic and also his own most loving admirer and about both he must say nothing.

The historian will tell you what happened. The novelist will tell you what it felt like.

We are mere journeymen, planting seeds for someone else to harvest.

God is a novelist. He uses all sorts of literary devices: alliteration, assonance, rhyme, synecdoche, onomatopoeia. But of all of these, His favorite is foreshadowing.And that is what God was doing at the Cloisters and with Eudora Welty. He was foreshadowing. He was laying traps, leaving clues, clues I could have seen had I been perceptive enough.

Didn't they realize that the only way to change things was to act?

If a person is not talented enough to be a novelist, not smart enough to be a lawyer, and his hands are too shaky to perform operations, he becomes a journalist.

There are many reasons why novelists write, but they all have one thing in common - a need to create an alternative world.

If you're happy in a dream, does that count?

For me, as a beginning novelist, all other living writers form a control group for whom the world is a placebo.

Every Observer writer wants to be a novelist.

The object of the novelist is to keep the reader entirely oblivious of the fact that the author exists - even of the fact he is reading a book.

Don't be a novelist --- be a statistician. Much more scope for the imagination.

Flora sighed. It was curious that persons who lived what the novelists called a rich emotional life always seemed to be a bit slow on the uptake.

"Between a high, solid wall and an egg that breaks against it, I will always stand on the side of the egg." Yes, no matter how right the wall may be and how wrong the egg, I will stand with the egg. Someone else will have to decide what is right and what is wrong; perhaps time or history will decide. If there were a novelist who, for whatever reason, wrote works standing with the wall, of what value would such works be?

It is better to be young in your failures than old in your successes.

I could see now that a literary education did not fit one for the popular novelist's trade.Once you had started using words like flavicomous or acroamatic, because you liked the sound of them, you were lost.

If you tell a novelist, 'Life's not like that', he has to do something about it. The poet simply replies, 'No, but I am.'

In effect I am not a novelist, but rather a failed essayist who started to write novels because he didn't know how to write essays.

Memories do not always soften with time; some grow edges like knives.

An honest man is one who knows that he can't consume more than he has produced.