Novelists Quotes - Page 7

I know to argue against our online lives seems like the argument of the grumpy, old Luddite novelist, but I really always try to make the argument from the perspective of personal pleasure.

A movie will do in one second, with one image, what it will take a novelist at least a page to describe.

The higher processes are all processes of simplification. The novelist must learn to write, and then he must unlearn it; just as the modern painter learns to draw, and then learns when utterly to disregard his accomplishment, when to subordinate it to a higher and truer effect.

And that singular anomaly, the lady novelist-- I don't think she'd be missed--I'm sure she'd not be missed!

I am a huge fan of Alan Furst. Furst is the best in the business--the most talented espionage novelist of our generation.

The artist deals with what cannot be said in words. The artist whose medium is fiction does this in words. The novelist says in words what cannot be said in words.

Rules such as "Write what you know," and "Show, don't tell," while doubtlessly grounded in good sense, can be ignored with impunity by any novelist nimble enough to get away with it. There is, in fact, only one rule in writing fiction: Whatever works, works.

The business of the poet and the novelist is to show the sorriness underlying the grandest things and the grandeur underlying the sorriest things.

I'm mostly a novelist these days, but I have written short stories in Fantasy, Science Fiction and horror.

How can we expect novelists to be moral, when their trade forces them to treat every end they meet as no more than an imperfect means to a novel?

Novelists have always had complete freedom to pretty much tell their story any way they saw fit. And that's what I'm trying to do.

It is fatal to know too much at the outcome: boredom comes as quickly to the traveler who knows his route as to the novelist who is over certain of his plot.

I meet kids now who become novelists, poets, write for the theater and movies, who were simply inspired by what they saw during the Spoleto Festival.

I get work because I'm primarily a novelist but I've become script doctor. I can work back and forth between French and English.

What's not realized about good novelists is that they're as competitive as good athletes. They study each other - where the other person is good and where the person is less good. Writers are like that but don't admit it.

I don't get involved in casting, budgets, location or promotion. Just the script. And, of course, the promotional tour. Which is fine with me - I'm a novelist.

You have to go out of your way as a suspense novelist to find situations where the protagonists are somewhat helpless and in real danger.

Lawrence Kelter is an exciting new novelist, who reminds me of an early Robert Ludlum.

All your questions can be answered, if that is what you want. But once you learn your answers, you can never unlearn them.

All gods are better than their reputation.

Before I became a suspense novelist, I wrote romantic suspense as Alicia Scott.

I never met anybody in my life who says, I want to be a critic. People want to be a fireman, poet, novelist.

Jane Austen was an extraordinary woman; to actually be able to survive as a novelist in those days - unmarried - was just unheard of.

A historian may be an artist too, and a novelist is a historian, the preserver, the keeper, the expounder, of human experience.

The novelist has more and more to say to readers who have less and less time to read: where to find the energy to engage a culture in crisis when the crisis consists in the impossibility of engaging with the culture?