Famous Quotes & Sayings

Gore Vidal

Southerners make good novelists: they have so many stories because they have so much family.

Jessica Savitch

Being a novelty had its advantages.

J. K. Rowling

In a novel you have to resist the urge to tell everything.

H. L. Mencken

Henry James would have been vastly improved as a novelist by a few whiffs of the Chicago stockyard.

Graham Swift

The novel that's contemporary in the sense of being wholly 'of now' is an impossibility, if only because novels may take years to write, so the 'now' with which they begin will be defunct by the time they're finished.

Tobias Wolff

And you can tell the writers who do it - Robert Stone, for example, who with each new novel is doing something new. I appreciate that in other writers.

Ezra Taft Benson

Many novels and modern publications are corrupters of morals or distorters of truth.

Orhan Pamuk

I think novelists should be disciplined and self-imposed working hours. I work a lot, but I don't feel that I'm working. I always feel that there is a child in me, healthy, and I'm playing.

A. S. Byatt

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

Rick Yancey

It's been a while since I've written a novel aimed at the adult market, but I never sit down and say to myself, 'Okay, now I'm going to write something for us old folks.' I get gripped by an idea, and I go where the idea takes me.

Charles Palliser

To make it interesting and worth doing, writing a novel has to be a leap into the unknown. I have to be unsure if I can write it; otherwise, I won't want to.

Pearl Cleage

I didn't have a dream of being a press secretary, I had a dream of being a playwright; I had a dream of being a novelist and a poet.

Curtis Sittenfeld

Personally, I have never wished I were a male novelist.

For the novels I wrote before selling anything, I didn't outline much. I had a vague idea of the story.

Irish novelist John Banville has a creepy, introverted imagination.

Alan Furst

Let me put it this way: I don't plan to retire. What would I do, become a brain surgeon? I mean, a brain surgeon can retire and write novels, but a novelist can't retire and do brain surgery - or at least he better not.

Ray Bradbury

In Hollywood, they think they know it all. You, as a writer, are essentially an outsider. Novelists and short-story writers, especially.

Eleanor Catton

When I was writing 'The Luminaries,' I read a lot of crime novels because I wanted to figure out which ones made me go, 'Ah! I didn't know that was coming!'