Novelists Quotes - Page 33

• Be born anywhere, little embryo novelist, but do not be born under the shadow of a great creed, not under the burden of original sin, not under the doom of Salvation.

  Pearl S. Buck

  Sins Not, Shadow, Littles

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• A novel is based on evidence, + or -x, the unknown quantity being the temperament of the novelist, and the unknown quantity always modifies the effect of the evidence, and sometimes transforms it entirely.

  E. M. Forster

  Fiction, Sometimes, Evidence

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• It is the function of the novelist to reveal the hidden life at its source: to tell us more about Queen Victoria than could be known, and thus to produce a character who is not the Queen Victoria of history.

  E. M. Forster

  Queens, Character, Fiction

  E. M. Forster (2010). “Aspects of the Novel”, p.72, RosettaBooks

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• People in a novel can be understood completely by the reader, if the novelist can be understood completely by the reader, if the novelist wishes; their inner as well as their outer life can be exposed.

  E. M. Forster

  People, Wish, Reader

  E. M. Forster (2010). “Aspects of the Novel”, p.74, RosettaBooks

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• It is never possible for a novelist to deny time inside the fabric of his novel: he must cling, however lightly, to the thread of his story, he must touch the interminable tapeworm, otherwise he becomes unintelligible, which, in his case, is a blunder.

  E. M. Forster

  Time, Stories, Fabric

  E. M. Forster (2010). “Aspects of the Novel”, p.50, RosettaBooks

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• I sometimes think novelists write about sex in order to avoid boring themselves to death.

  Walker Percy

  Sex, Writing, Thinking

  Walker Percy (2011). “Signposts in a Strange Land”, p.94, Open Road Media

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• 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

  Imitation, Poet, Conducting

  Gore Vidal (1968). “Sex, Death, and Money”

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• In general, of course, a stranger who tries to get you into an automobile is anything but noble, and in general a person who quotes great American novelists is anything but treacherous, and in general a man who says you needn't worry about money, or a man who smokes cigarettes, is somewhere in between.

  Daniel Handler

  Men, People, Worry

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• Let’s hope the institution of marriage survives its detractors, for without it there would be no more adultery and without adultery two thirds of our novelists would stand in line for unemployment checks.

  Peter S. Prescott

  Writing, Two, Would Be

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• Don't be a novelist --- be a statistician. Much more scope for the imagination.

  Darrell Huff

  Imagination, Scope, Statistician

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• Just as the painter thinks with his brush and paints the novelist thinks with his story.

  W. Somerset Maugham

  Thinking, Fiction, Stories

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• Among the many problems which beset the novelist, not the least weighty is the choice of the moment at which to begin his novel.

  Vita Sackville-West

  Writing, Choices, Problem

  Vita Sackville-West (2015). “Vita Sackville-West: Selected Writings”, p.352, Macmillan

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• Comic books themselves are getting more literate. And there are people who are screenwriters and television writers and novelists who are writing for the comics, for some reason, they love doing it and some of the art work in the comics, I mean it rivals anything you'll see hanging on the walls of museums, they're illustrations more than drawings and all the people are discovering this and they're turning on to it.

  Stan Lee

  Art, Wall, Book

  Source: movieweb.com

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• Things seem to be at a boiling point all the time. In fact, it has been that way my whole life. I find it interesting, and I like the fact that the emotions are in your face all the time. You always know where you stand. None of that "we don't have any racial problems here" attitude that you get, say, up north. All of this is rich fodder for a crime novelist.

  George Pelecanos

  Attitude, Up North, Interesting

  Interview with Keith Phipps, www.avclub.com. September 19, 2001.

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• In Europe, I'm recognized on the street sometimes. And that's cool, because I don't have to live there and deal with it every day. Unless you're Stephen King - a great writer, by the way, and anyone who says different knows nothing about the craft - you're more likely to be recognized in America if you play in a soap opera than if you're a novelist.

  George Pelecanos

  Kings, Europe, Play

  Interview with Keith Phipps, www.avclub.com. September 19, 2001.

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• I'm a novelist, I'm not an activist. I'm not a non-fiction writer, I'm not a journalist. I'm not a foodie, I'm not even really an animal person, or an environmentalist. I did the best I could with this, but it's not who I am.

  Jonathan Safran Foer

  Animal, Who I Am, Fiction

  Interview with Gregg LaGambina, www.avclub.com. November 17, 2009.

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• The novelist, unlike many of his colleagues, makes up a number of word-masses roughly describing himself (roughly: niceties shallcome later), gives them names and sex, assigns them plausible gestures, and causes them to speak by the use of inverted commas, and perhaps to behave consistently.

  E. M. Forster

  Sex, Character, Names

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• 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.

  W. H. Auden

  Country, Roles, Balzac

  "Forewords and Afterwords" by W. H. Auden, ("A Poet of the Actual"), (p. 266), 1973.

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• And that singular anomaly, the lady novelist--
  I don't think she'd be missed--I'm sure she'd not be
  missed!

  W. S. Gilbert

  Thinking, Anomalies

  The Mikado act 1 (1885)

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• I could see now that a literary education did not fit one for the popular novelist's trade.Once you had started using words like flavicomous or acroamatic, because you liked the sound of them, you were lost.

  Woodrow Wilson

  Sound, Using Words, Fit

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• Possibly the Creator did not make the world chiefly for the purpose of providing studies for gifted novelists; but if He had done so, we can scarcely imagine that He could have offered anything much better in the way of material.

  Elizabeth Stuart Phelps Ward

  Way, Purpose, Done

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• In the compact between novelist and reader, the novelist promises to lie, and the reader promises to allow it.

  Cynthia Ozick

  Lying, Reading, Promise

  Cynthia Ozick (1996). “A Cynthia Ozick Reader”, p.311, Indiana University Press

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• A great novelist must open the reader's heart, allow the reader to remember the vastness and glory -- and shame and shabbiness -- of what it is to be human.

  Carolyn See

  Heart, Vastness, Remember

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• Of all the hot liquors, I regard buttered rum as the worst. I believe that the drinking of it should be permitted only in the "Northwest Passage" and, even there, only by highly imaginative and overenthusiastic novelists.

  David A. Embury

  Drinking, Believe, Hot

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

  H. L. Mencken

  Chicago, Has Beens

  H.L. Mencken (2012). “Mencken Chrestomathy”, p.500, Vintage

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