Novelists Quotes - Page 9

The nation which once held the creed that greatness is achieved by production, is now told that it is achieved by squalor.

I do not seek the good of others as a sanction for my right to exist, nor do I recognize the good of others as a justification for their seizure of my property or their destruction of my life.

When men abandon reason, physical force becomes their only means of dealing with one another and of settling disagreements.

Great sorrow or great joy should bring intense hunger--not abstinence from food, as our novelists will have it.

Of Dickens' style it is impossible to speak in praise. It is jerky, ungrammatical, and created by himself in defiance of rules... No young novelist should ever dare to imitate the style of Dickens.

TZETZE (or TSETSE) FLY, n. An African insect ("Glossina morsitans") whose bite is commonly regarded as nature's most efficacious remedy for insomnia, though some patients prefer that of the American novelist ("Mendax interminabilis").

I never see a novel as a film while I'm writing it. Mostly because novels and films are so different, and I'm such an internal novelist

It is not the office of a novelist to show us how to behave ourselves; it is not the business of fiction to teach us anything.

Money is the necessity that frees us from necessity. Of all novelists in any country, Trollope best understands the role of money. Compared with him even Balzac is a romantic.

To what degree are historians chroniclers of the truth and to what degree are they just novelists, frankly?

Not since Lord of the Flies has a novelist written with such perceptiveness about the potential for harm that lurks within the innocence of childhood.

As a novelist you have just unlimited budget, total creative control. You really get to have your cake - all the cake - and then you can have a second cake if you wanted to.

Novelists have to love humanity to write anything worthwhile. Poets have to love themselves.

As you know, I am a novelist, and I really want to write novels. But I knew enough about the Dreyfus case to understand immediately why what happened to Dreyfus was not merely a cause celebre from the end of the 19th century, but an event that could be shown to teach us lessons of the greatest importance for our own time.

Bravery hides in amazing places.

Never underestimate the Pricey.

That is the dream of all novelists-that one of their characters will become 'somebody.'

All novelists should live in two different worlds: a real one and an unreal one.

Novelists want to flood, poets want to distill.

A novelist who ranks with Proust , Kafka , Musil and his friend James Joyce as one of the enduring pillars of Modernism.

How can a novelist achieve atonement when, with her absolute power of deciding outcomes, she is also God?

A novelist is a man who doesn't like his mother.

I want you to be afraid to turn the page (and to do that) you need to show right from the beginning that you're playing for keeps.

I believe that only poetry counts ... A great novelist is first of all a great poet.

The thing I love about Dickens is the omniscient, omnipotent narrator, and the great confidence of the narrator, which marks 19th-century novelists in general and Dickens in particular.