Novelists Quotes - Page 27

• I am, when you stop to think of it, a member of a fairly select group: the final handful of American novelists who learned to read and write before they learned to eat a daily helping of video bullshit.

  Stephen King

  Writing, Thinking, Bullshit

  Stephen King (2000). “On Writing: A Memoir Of The Craft”, p.20, Simon and Schuster

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• I didn't start running because somebody asked me to become a runner. Just like I didn't become a novelist because someone asked me to. One day, out of the blue, I wanted to write a novel. And one day, out of the blue, I started to run-simply because I wanted to. I've always done whatever I felt like doing in life. People may try to stop me, and convince me I'm wrong, but I won't change.

  Haruki Murakami

  Running, Writing, Blue

  FaceBook post by Haruki Murakami from Aug 21, 2015

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• By the respectable terms of the modern literary profession, novelists do not preach. And, in fact, there has probably not been a less respectable novelist among the irrefutably enduring writers of our time than Ayn Rand: philosopher queen of the best-seller lists in the forties and fifties, cult phenomenon and nationally declared threat to public morality in the sixties, guru to the Libertarians and to White House economic policy in the seventies, and a continuing exemplar or Wilde's tragic observation that more than half of modern culture depends on what one shouldn't read.

  Claudia Roth

  Queens, White, House

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• 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

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

  Pseudonymous Bosch

  Hungry, Madmen, Power Hungry

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• 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

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• The novelist is the person who spends a lot of his or her day thinking about the human drama and emotional complexity.

  Thane Rosenbaum

  Drama, Emotional, Thinking

  "The 'Ready for Her Close-Up" Transcript" by Dahlia Lithwick, www.slate.com. May 26, 2015.

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

  Francois Mauriac

  Believe, Firsts, Poet

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• 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

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• 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

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• 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

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• 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

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• 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

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• Whether you're an unpublished novelist or a sixteen-time New York Times bestselling author, you can always improve your craft. You can always become a better writer.

  Robert Dugoni

  New York, Writing, Crafts

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• 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

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• 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

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• 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

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• Teaching has ruined more American novelists than drink.

  Gore Vidal

  Education, Teaching, Drinking

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

  Leslie Fiedler

  People, Firefighter, Want

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• Miss Austen had shown the infinite possibilities of ordinary and present things for the novelist.

  George Saintsbury

  Missing, Ordinary, Infinite

  George Saintsbury (2012). “The English Novel”, p.234, tredition

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• The novelist now usurps the chair of the educator, the pulpit of the preacher, the columns of the journalist. Yet his original purpose of entertaining may have been his highest purpose. (introduction to Gladiator, Book League Monthly, 1930)

  Philip Wylie

  Book, League, May

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• I’ve had the pleasure of hearing The Novelists perform live.  They are gifted songwriters and talented musicians with strong lead voices. This is a band with lots of heart & soul.

  Daryl Stuermer

  Strong, Heart, Voice

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• For the first-time novelist you've got to get up at 5:30 in the morning and write until 7, make breakfast and go to work. Or, come home and work for an hour. Everybody has an hour in their day somewhere.

  Ridley Pearson

  Morning, Home, Writing

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• A novelist is an elephant, but an elephant who must pretend to forget.

  Mary McCarthy

  Elephants, Forget

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• All kinds of mysterious phenomena exist in this world, but answers to most of them have come with advances in scientific knowledge. Love is the sole holdout-nothing can explain it. A Chinese writer by the name of Ah Cheng wrote that love is just a chemical reaction, an unconventional point of view that seemed quite fresh at the time. But if love can be controlled and initiated by means of chemistry, then novelists would be out of a job. So while he may have had his finger on the truth, I'll remain a member of the loyal opposition.

  Mo Yan

  Jobs, Mean, Love Is

  Mo Yan (2013). “Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out: A Novel”, p.597, Skyhorse Publishing, Inc.

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