Novelists Quotes - Page 5

Unfortunately for novelists, real life is getting way too funny and far-fetched.

It is morally obscene to regard wealth as an anonymous, tribal product and to talk about 'redistributing' it.

To be a novelist, all I need is a pen and a piece of paper.

To ask a novelist to talk about his novels is like asking somebody to cook about their dancing.

A novelist should make you realize nothing is stable. If you don't believe anything with robustness, you're doing something more radical than anything else.

Every novelist should write something for children at least once in his lifetime.

Americans and their desire to be novelists, the American novel should be listed in medical dictionaries alongside Megalomania and Obsessional Neuroses.

The historian records, but the novelist creates.

Really, the novelist has the best casting since he doesn't have to cope with the actors and all the rest. -Alfred Hitchcock

I don't really consider myself a novelist, it just came out purely by accident.

It is part of the novelist's convention not to mention soup and salmon and ducklings, as if soup and salmon and ducklings were of no importance.

The real novelist, the perfectly simple human being, could go on, indefinitely imaging.

The wisdom of literature is quite antithetical to having opinions. 'Nothing is my last word about anything,' said Henry James. Furnishing opinions, even correct opinions - whenever asked - cheapens what novelists and poets do best, which is to sponsor reflectiveness, to pursue complexity. Information will never replace illumination.

Everything written, if it has anything in it, will offend someone, and if the mere taking of offence was to amount to a licence to kill the offender, well the world would be sadly underpopulated of novelists, columnists, bloggers, and the writers of editorials.

If you only write when inspired, you may be a fairly decent poet, but you'll never be a novelist.

The funniest things are the forbidden.

The essayist has to follow a certain intellectual pattern. The novelist has the advantage of using fantasy, of being subjective.

Most novelists I know went through a period of intense self-examination and self-loathing after the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center. I certainly did.

Novelists tell that piece of truth hidden at the bottom of every lie.

What description of clouds and sunsets was to the old novelist, description of scientific apparatus and methods is to the modern Scientific Detective writer.

All good novelists have bad memories. What you remember comes out as journalism; what you forget goes into the compost of the imagination.

A very important thing is not to make up your mind that you are any one thing.

It is well to start by distinguishing the few really great - the major novelists who count in the same way as the major poets, in the sense that they not only change the possibilities of the art for practitioners and readers, but that they are significant in terms of the human awareness they promote; awareness of the possibilities of life.

As far as he can achieve it, readability is as important for the scientific writer as it is for the novelist.

I'm more influenced by novelists than I am by filmmakers.