Famous Quotes & Sayings

Beth Henley

But here's the thing: what you do as a screenwriter is you sell your copyright. As a novelist, as a poet, as a playwright, you maintain your copyright

Anthony Burgess

A novelist should not be too intelligent either, although. . . he may be permitted to be an intellectual.

Richard Flanagan

After writing a novel, what is there to say? If a novelist could say it in a maxim, they wouldn't need 120,000 words, several years and sundry characters, plots and subplots, and so on. I'd much rather listen always.

Simon Mawer

Sometimes I think that novelists suffer from P.C.S.: Perpetual Childhood Syndrome.

Jane Smiley

A novelist is on the cusp between someone who knows everything and someone who knows nothing.

Jane Smiley

Novelists never have to footnote.

Ruth Rendell

There are some novelists who can get away with writing about sex - Philip Roth, Ian McEwan - but they are rare.

Dean Koontz

Not all popular novelists are good, but all good novelists are, sooner or later, popular.

Billy Bob Thornton

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

Aleksandar Hemon

I resist when someone calls me a novelist: it implies some kind of inherent superiority of the novel. I'm not a novelist, I'm a writer.

Don DeLillo

One connection I see between novelists and terrorists is that we both attempt to alter consciousness.

Don DeLillo

I'm a novelist, period. An American novelist.

Don DeLillo

What terrorists gain, novelists lose.

Rita Mae Brown

Not until my middle thirties did I consider myself a novelist.

Storm Jameson

The writer - more especially the novelist - who has not, at one moment or another, considered his publisher unworthy of him, has still to be conceived.

Tom Perrotta

The lesson you have to learn as novelist is how to be collaborative, and how to say, "I don't get to dictate this."

Sophie Kinsella

The great thing about being a novelist is that you organize your own day.

Thomas Hardy

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

V. S. Pritchett

It is less the business of the novelist to tell us what happened than to show how it happened.

Stephen King

I just saw myself as a novelist.

Stephen Vizinczey

You tell me your favorite novelists and I'll tell you whom you vote for, or whether you vote at all.

Taiye Selasi

As a novelist, I ask of myself only that I tell the truth and that I tell it beautifully.

Steven Millhauser

God pity the poor novelist.

Richard Grossman

Salvation is an individual relationship with God. I've always considered myself to be a devotional poet, and I consider myself to be a devotional novelist.

Philip Larkin

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.'

Frank Norris

The function of the novelist... is to comment upon life as he sees it.

Howard Gordon

I guess I've always been an aspiring novelist. I went to Princeton and wrote a novel for my thesis.

Gore Vidal

Universities are filled with poets and novelists conducting demure and careful lives in imitation of Eliot and Forster and those others who (through what seems to be have been discretion) made it.

Gore Vidal

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

H. L. Mencken

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

Nelson DeMille

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

P. G. Wodehouse

No novelists any good except me. Sovietski -- yah! Nastikoff -- bah! I spit me of zem all. No novelists anywhere any good except me. P. G. Wodehouse and Tolstoi not bad. Not good, but not bad. No novelists any good except me.

Kurt Vonnegut

I think I belong to America's last generation of novelists. Novelists will come one by one from now on, not in seeming families, and will perhaps write only one or two novels, and let it go at that.