Novelists Quotes - Page 36

• I get work because I'm primarily a novelist but I've become script doctor. I can work back and forth between French and English.

  Norman Spinrad

  Doctors, Scripts, Back And Forth

  7 Copy quote

• As a novelist, you deepen your characters as you go, adding layers. As a reporter, you try to peel layers away: observing subjects enough to get beneath the surface, re-questioning a source to find the facts. But these processes aren't so different.

  Amy Waldman

  Character, Trying, Different

  4 Copy quote

• Children make better readers than adults. They read as carefully as I write; adults read as a means of getting off to sleep. I get letters saying 'I have read your book seventeen times.' If you're an adult novelist and you get that letter, you should be afraid. You're being stalked. Kids always read them seventeen times!

  Daniel Pinkwater

  Children, Book, Mean

  6 Copy quote

• As a novelist, I mined my history, my family and my memory, but in a very specific way. Writing fiction, I never made use of experiences immediately as they happened. I needed to let things fester in my memory, mature and transmogrify into something meaningful.

  Ayelet Waldman

  Meaningful, Memories, Writing

  4 Copy quote

• Being a novelist is hard for anyone - male or female. You don't get to quit your day job.

  Jennifer Weiner

  Jobs, Males, Female

  "Battle of the authors' sexes continues" by Alison Flood, www.theguardian.com. January 27, 2012.

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• Every genuinely literary style, from the high authorial voice to Foster Wallace and his footnotes-within-footnotes, requires the reader to see the world from somewhere in particular, or from many places. So every novelist's literary style is nothing less than an ethical strategy - it's always an attempt to get the reader to care about people who are not the same as he or she is.

  Zadie Smith

  Writing, Voice, People

  4 Copy quote

• The artist deals with what cannot be said in words. The novelist says in words what cannot be said in words.

  Barbara Kingsolver

  Writing, Artist, Said

  Barbara Kingsolver (2011). “High Tide in Tucson”, p.172, Faber & Faber

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• When I was 30 or so - by that time I had become an assistant D.A. - I decided I would try to write a novel. To be clear: I did not decide to become a novelist. Honestly, it never crossed my mind that I could actually earn a living as a professional novelist.

  William Landay

  Writing, Mind, Trying

  4 Copy quote

• It's hard for me to believe that a shy, bespectacled college graduate like Brad Meltzer who's a novelist and a father is a really setting out to be weirdly misogynistic.

  Grant Morrison

  Father, Believe, College

  5 Copy quote

• As a novelist, I'm endlessly fascinated by human behavior and interactions.

  Juliet Marillier

  Behavior, Interaction, Humans

  4 Copy quote

• To a novelist, fluidity is the ultimate good omen; suddenly difficult problems are simply solved, intractable structural knots loosen themselves, and you come upon the key without even recognizing that this is what you hold.

  Zadie Smith

  Keys, Fluidity, Problem

  "Changing My Mind: Occasional Essays". Book by Zadie Smith, 2009.

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• The Novelist As Teacher”: “I would be quite satisfied if my novels (especially the ones I set in the past) did no more than teach my readers that their past – with all its imperfections – was not one long night of savagery from which the first Europeans acting on God’s behalf delivered them.

  Chinua Achebe

  Teacher, Past, Night

  Chinua Achebe (2009). “Things Fall Apart: Authoritative Text, Contexts and Criticism”, W W Norton & Company Incorporated

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• As a successful romantic novelist - one of my publishers is Mills & Boon - I create the sort of male heroes that no woman could fail to adore and few real men could hope to emulate.

  P. C. Cast

  Real, Hero, Successful

  7 Copy quote

• Novelists want to flood, poets want to distill.

  J. D. McClatchy

  Want, Poet, Flood

  6 Copy quote

• I cling to the basic set of tenets laid out in Tom Wolfe's 'New Journalism' - to get out there like the great French novelists of the 19th century and study life. I am a Tom Wolfe fan of the first order.

  Peter York

  Study Life, Order, Fans

  4 Copy quote

• When you get inside a literary novel you feel that the author, more often than not, just doesn't know enough about things. They haven't been around enough - novelists never go anywhere. Once I discovered true books about real things - books like 'How To Run a Company' - I stopped reading novels.

  Peter York

  Running, Real, Reading

  7 Copy quote

• Although some people think I am a romantic novelist I have always thought of myself as a rather gritty radical historian.

  Philippa Gregory

  Thinking, People, Radical

  4 Copy quote

• There are many ways of writing badly about painting... There is an 'appreciative' language of threadbare, not inaccurate, but overexposed and irritating words... the language of the schools which 'situates' works and artists in schools and movements... novelists and poets [that] see paintings as allegories of writing.

  A. S. Byatt

  School, Writing, Artist

  7 Copy quote

• 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

  5 Copy quote

• 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.

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• Great sorrow or great joy should bring intense hunger--not abstinence from food, as our novelists will have it.

  Arthur Conan Doyle

  Joy, Sorrow, Hunger

  Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (Illustrated)”, p.1744, Delphi Classics

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• Today there are a lot of novelists who seem to be writing to be reviewed, not read.

  Pete Hamill

  Writing, Today, Seems

  5 Copy quote

• What's not realized about good novelists is that they're as competitive as good athletes. They study each other - where the other person is good and where the person is less good. Writers are like that but don't admit it.

  Norman Mailer

  Athlete, Competition, Study

  "Mailer Tells a Lot. Not All, but a Lot.; His Longest Love Affair Is With the U.S." by Bernard Weinraub, www.nytimes.com. October 4, 2000.

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• A novelist must know what his last chapter is going to say and one way or another work toward that last chapter. ... To me it is utterly basic, yet it seems like it's a great secret.

  Leon Uris

  Secret, Way, Lasts

  8 Copy quote

• Some Pulitzer winners - novelists - have confided to me that getting the prize screwed them up. It messed with their heads. That hasn't been my experience.

  Jeffrey Eugenides

  Success, Winner, Prize

  4 Copy quote