Novelists Quotes - Page 24

• I am not much of a researcher as a novelist; I write mainly from experience.

  Mohsin Hamid

  Writing, Researchers

  4 Copy quote

• Historian: an unsuccessful novelist.

  H. L. Mencken

  History, Historical, Unsuccessful

  "A Mencken Chrestomathy". Book by H. L. Mencken, 1949.

  58 Copy quote

  Show source

• A novelist needs to know his own strong points and weak points.

  David Mitchell

  Strong, Needs, Weak Points

  5 Copy quote

• I'm a novelist, that's how I make my livelihood, and I concentrate on the novels.

  David Mitchell

  Novel, Livelihood

  4 Copy quote

• I am worrying about my country. I feel I have a responsibility as a novelist to do something.

  Haruki Murakami

  Country, Responsibility, Worry

  4 Copy quote

• As a novelist, you could say that I am dreaming while I am awake, and every day I can continue with yesterday's dream. Because it is a dream, there are so many contradictions and I have to adjust them to make the story work. But, in principle, the original dream does not change.

  Haruki Murakami

  Dream, Yesterday, Principles

  4 Copy quote

• For novelists or musicians, if they really want to create something, they need to go downstairs and find a passage to get into the second basement. What I want to do is go down there, but still stay sane.

  Haruki Murakami

  Musician, Needs, Want

  4 Copy quote

• Sometimes I wonder why I'm a novelist right now. There is no definite career reason why I became a writer. Something happened, and I became a writer. And now I'm a successful writer.

  Haruki Murakami

  Successful, Careers, Reason Why

  "Haruki Murakami: 'I took a gamble and survived'". Interview with Emma Brockes, www.theguardian.com. October 14, 2011.

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• A novelist is, like all mortals, more fully at home on the surface of the present than in the ooze of the past.

  Vladimir Nabokov

  Home, Past, Surface

  1964 Interview in Playboy, Jan.

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• Happy is the novelist who manages to preserve an actual love letter that he received when he was young within a work of fiction, embedded in it like a clean bullet in flabby flesh and quite secure there, among spurious lives.

  Vladimir Nabokov

  Fiction, Letters, Flesh

  Vladimir Nabokov (2012). “Speak, Memory: An Autobiography Revisited”, p.206, Penguin UK

  8 Copy quote

  Show source

• Manners are of such great consequence to the novelist that any kind will do. Bad manners are better than no manners at all, and because we are losing our customary manners, we are probably overly conscious of them; this seems to be a condition that produces writers.

  Flannery O'Connor

  Literature, Losing, Kind

  Flannery O'Connor (1969). “Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose”, p.29, Macmillan

  8 Copy quote

  Show source

• To be true to life, a novel must have an ending that is inevitable given the specific personalities of the characters involved. The novelist must not impose an ending upon them.

  Joyce Carol Oates

  Character, Personality, True Life

  "A Reader’s Guide to the Recent Novels of Joyce Carol Oates". Interview, celestialtimepiece.com.

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• Short-story writing requires an exquisite sense of balance. Novelists, frankly, can get away with more. A novel can have a dull spot or two, because the reader has made a different commitment.

  Lynn Abbey

  Commitment, Writing, Two

  7 Copy quote

• While the novelist is banging on his typewriter, the poet is watching a fly in the windowpane.

  Billy Collins

  Typewriters, Poet, Banging

  FaceBook post by Billy Collins from May 31, 2013

  25 Copy quote

  Show source

• Not all novelists are power-hungry madman. Some are power-hungry madwomen.

  Pseudonymous Bosch

  Hungry, Madmen, Power Hungry

  12 Copy quote

• He looks like a man.' 'How descriptive,' Susan said in a droll tone. 'Remind me never to advise you to seek work as a novelist.

  Julia Quinn

  Men, Looks, Tone

  4 Copy quote

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

  Francois Mauriac

  Believe, Firsts, Poet

  6 Copy quote

• A novelist has to know enough about a subject to fool the passenger next to him on an airplane.

  David Foster Wallace

  Writing, Airplane, Next

  4 Copy quote

• The illusion of the seventh veil was the illusion that you could get somebody else to do it for you. To think for you. To hang on your cross. The priest, the rabbi, the imam, the swami, the philosophical novelist were traffic cops, at best. They might direct you through a busy intersection, but they wouldn't follow you home and park your car.

  Tom Robbins

  Philosophical, Home, Thinking

  5 Copy quote

• A short story is a sprint, a novel is a marathon. Sprinters have seconds to get from here to there and then they are finished. Marathoners have to carefully pace themselves so that they don't run out of energy (or in the case of the novelist-- ideas) because they have so far to run. To mix the metaphor, writing a short story is like having a short intense affair, whereas writing a novel is like a long rich marriage.

  Jonathan Carroll

  Running, Writing, Ideas

  7 Copy quote

• A novelist has two lives-- a reading and writing life, and a lived life. he or she cannot be understood at all apart from this.

  Jane Smiley

  Reading, Writing, Two

  4 Copy quote

• We must take our sentences seriously, which means we must understand them philosophically, and the odd thing is that the few who do, who take them with utter sober seriousness, the utter sober seriousness of right-wing parsons and political saviors, the owners of Pomeranians, are the liars who want to be believed, the novelists and poets, who know that the creatures they imagine have no other being than the sounding syllables which the reader will speak into his own weary and distracted head. There are no magic words. To say the words is magical enough.

  William H. Gass

  Liars, Mean, Wings

  4 Copy quote

• How much can we ever know about the love and pain in another's heart? How much can we hope to understand those who have suffered deeper anguish, greater deprivation, and more crushing disappointments than we ourselves have known? Even if the world's rich and powerful were to put themselves in the shoes of the rest, how much would they really understand the wretched millions suffering around them? So it is when Orhan the novelist peers into the dark corners of his poet friend's difficult and painful life: How much can he really see?

  Orhan Pamuk

  Crush, Pain, Powerful

  Orhan Pamuk (2011). “Snow”, p.266, Faber & Faber

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• Thank God for novelists. Thank God there are people willing to write everything down. Otherwise, so much would be forgotten.

  Kurt Vonnegut

  Writing, People, Thank God

  Kurt Vonnegut (1999). “Breakfast of Champions: Or, Goodbye Blue Monday!”, CNIB, 197

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• The novelist must look on humanity without partiality or prejudice. His sympathy, like that of the historian, must be unbounded, and untainted by sect or party.

  Goldwin Smith

  Sympathy, Party, Humanity

  Goldwin Smith (1881). “Lectures and Essays”, New York : Macmillan

  27 Copy quote

  Show source