Novelists Quotes - Page 35

• I think that if the novel's task is to describe where we find ourselves and how we live now, the novelist must take a good, hard look at the most central facts of contemporary life - technology and science.

  Richard Powers

  Technology, Thinking, Tasks

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• It is the job of the novelist to touch the reader.

  Elizabeth George

  Jobs, Reader

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• Alternate history fascinates me, as it fascinates all novelists, because 'What if?' is the big thing.

  Kate Atkinson

  What If, Bigs, Big Things

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• I want to be a popular novelist who's also serious, or a serious novelist who's also very accessible.

  Douglas Kennedy

  Want, Serious

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• I try very hard to be fair, and I look for ironies. In a way, I live on ironies as a novelist.

  Robert Stone

  Trying, Way, Looks

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

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• I do have a very strong sense that most of the terrible things in life happen suddenly and unpredictably, and certainly can sweep you off in different directions, and that is always of interest to a novelist.

  Ian Mcewan

  Strong, Things In Life, Different

  Source: www.telegraph.co.uk

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• I couldn't think about novels at all. It seemed the only writing that was appropriate to that horrendous event was journalism, reportage. And, in fact, I think the profession rose quite honorably to the task. Novelists require a slower turnover, I mean, in time.

  Ian Mcewan

  Writing, Mean, Thinking

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• I'm really aware that in fiction, women are pretty much equal. There's a lot of very successful women novelists. Not so much [for women writers working] in film.

  Emma Donoghue

  Successful, Fiction, Film

  "Room" Author/Screenwriter Emma Donoghue on Her "Deeply Feminist" Film and Industry Sexism". Interview with Laura Berger, www.indiewire.com. October 16, 2015.

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• Playing with different genres and perspectives and ways of telling stories is one of the perks of being a novelist, but at the same time, I want precision. And in order to be precise about stuff, you have to get personal. Symbolism is very boring.

  Linn Ullmann

  Symbolism, Order, Perspective

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• I was writing from the time I was 12 years old, but I originally wanted to be a novelist.

  Christopher McQuarrie

  Writing, Years, Wanted

  "Biography/ Personal Quotes". www.imdb.com.

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• The Treatise of the Three Impostors is a book that enjoyed centuries of notorious nonexistence until (as Voltaire would say) it became necessary to invent it. Georges Minois writes with empathy, erudition, and a novelist's sense of buildup and timing, weaving in the parallel story of Europe's courageous freethinkers. In the face of today's social and even legal pressures against criticizing religion, it is good to see an honorable French tradition asserting itself.

  Joscelyn Godwin

  Book, Writing, Europe

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• As a novelist, your impulse is toward multiplicity: multiple voices, multiple perceptions, multiple nuances, the ambiguity in human communication. Fiction really is the ultimate home for that sense of ambiguity.

  Pankaj Mishra

  Communication, Home, Voice

  Interview with Sarah Fay, staging.believermag.com. March 2007.

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• I feel the responsibility of the novelist is to create a very complex world populated by very complex individuals and to deepen that as much as possible. I don't think the responsibility of the reporter or journalist is fundamentally different.

  Pankaj Mishra

  Responsibility, Thinking, Different

  Interview with Sarah Fay, staging.believermag.com. March 2007.

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• I always counsel aspiring novelists that passion is the most important quality for a writer to possess - technique can be taught, but that relentless desire to write has to come from within.

  Lisa Kleypas

  Writing, Passion, Important

  "Interview: Lisa Kleypas, author of 'Crystal Cove'". Interview with Pamela Clare, happyeverafter.usatoday.com. February 14, 2013.

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• I think it's restrictive to typecast myself as a novelist because I enjoy other forms of expression. I love literature and I love cinema.

  Julia Leigh

  Thinking, Expression, Cinema

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• People really want to believe that there is no fiction. I think they find it much easier to imagine that novelists are writing memoirs, writing about their lives, because it's difficult to conceive that there's a great imaginary life in which you can participate.

  Mark Leyner

  Believe, Writing, Thinking

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• San Francisco has long been a leader in the arts, nurturing generations of painters, sculptors, poets, novelists, playwrights, film-makers, and performing artists and innovators of every kind.

  Gavin Newsom

  Art, San Francisco, Long

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• To present a scientific subject in an attractive and stimulating manner is an artistic task, similar to that of a novelist or even a dramatic writer. The same holds for writing textbooks.

  Max Born

  Book, Writing, Science

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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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• I used to describe myself as a comic novelist, but my concerns seem to have darkened over the past few years.

  Tom Perrotta

  Past, Years, Comic

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

  Curtis Sittenfeld

  Males

  "Curtis Sittenfeld: 'American Wife is the opposite of satire'". Interview with Hadley Freeman, www.theguardian.com. November 15, 2010.

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• The fact is that in this day and age I don't think any novelist can assume that a book will get attention.

  Curtis Sittenfeld

  Book, Thinking, Age

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• I plot as I go. Many novelists write an outline that has almost as many pages as their ultimate book. Others knock out a brief synopsis... Do what is comfortable. If you have to plot out every move your characters make, so be it. Just make sure there is a plausible purpose behind their machinations. A good reader can smell a phony plot a block away.

  Clive Cussler

  Block, Moving, Book

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• Would-be novelists need to bring equal parts arrogance and ignorance to the task before them. The arrogance is almost self-explanatory. Walk into any bookstore or library, calculate how many lifetimes the average person would need to read all the fiction contained therein. To think that one has anything to contribute, to any genre or tradition, takes genuine hubris.

  Laura Lippman

  Ignorance, Writing, Thinking

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• Nobody asks you to do this. The world out there is not panting after another novelist. We choose it

  Paul Auster

  Writing, World, Asks

  "'I used to feel like people were trampling over me to get to my husband. I had print marks on my body'". Interview with Rachel Cooke, www.theguardian.com. May 24, 2008.

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