Novelists Quotes - Page 24

• Not until my middle thirties did I consider myself a novelist.

  Rita Mae Brown

  Middle

  "Write On" by Rita Mae Brown, www.huffingtonpost.com. March 18, 2010.

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• One of the admirable features of British novelists is that they have no scruple about setting their stories in foreign settings with wholly foreign personnel.

  James Buchan

  Stories, Scruples, British

  "Sold, for two truckloads of oranges" by James Buchan, www.theguardian.com. February 11, 2006.

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• I am not an academic who happens to have written a novel. I am a novelist who happens to be quite good academically.

  A. S. Byatt

  Academic, Happens, Written

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• I hated being a novelist when I was 20 - I had nothing to write about.

  A. S. Byatt

  Writing, Hated

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• Novelists are not equipped to make a movie, in my opinion. They make their own movie when they write: they're casting, they're dressing the scene, they're working out where the energy of the scene is coming from and they're also relying tremendously on the creative imagination of the reader.

  John le Carre

  Writing, Work Out, Imagination

  "John le Carré at the NFT". Interview with Adrian Wootton, www.theguardian.com. October 5, 2002.

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• I was going to be a great woman novelist. Then the war came along and I think it's hard for young people today, don't you, to realize that when World War II happened we were dying to go and help our country.

  Julia Child

  Country, War, Thinking

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• That's what a good crime novelist - any good novelist - should do with you: play with your perceptions while showing you everything in plain sight.

  Harlan Coben

  Sight, Play, Perception

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• Without a doubt, I was born to want to make cinema, but the kind of cinema I want to make is not like commercial movies, which I enjoy myself, but I wanted to be the kind of filmmaker who wrote original work, sort of like a novelist would who deals with who we are and our times or our relationships.

  Francis Ford Coppola

  Doubt, Cinema, Want

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• I'm a novelist, not a social scientist or a commentator.

  Rachel Cusk

  Scientist, Social, Commentators

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• I'm inspired by playwrights, novelists, poets: The value of language has been a lifelong passion of mine. I enjoy it. I'm good at it.

  Mos Def

  Passion, Language, Inspired

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• I thought I wanted to be a journalist or a novelist.

  Lena Dunham

  Journalist, Wanted

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• Well I'm not a novelist. I've only written one book and that is a memoir.

  Carly Fiorina

  Book, Memoir, Wells

  "RCP Newsmaker Interview With Carly Fiorina". RealClearPolitics Interview, www.realclearpolitics.com. August 5, 2010.

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• My greatest fear is feeling like a professional novelist. Somebody who creates characters, who sits down and has pieces of paper taped to the wall - what's going to happen in this scene, or this act. What I like is for it to be a much more scary, sloppy reflection of who I am.

  Jonathan Safran Foer

  Wall, Character, Reflection

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• I suspect there are two kinds of novelists. Those who have a point of view and have something to say and then write a novel in order to say that thing, and those of us who write the book in order to find out what we think about that thing.

  Neil Gaiman

  Book, Writing, Thinking

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• I started writing short fiction very briefly, as I imagine is the case for some novelists.

  William Gibson

  Writing, Fiction, Imagine

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• I assume that - because you can get degrees in journalism from very reputable universities - I assume that people can be trained to be journalists. I've never been entirely certain that anyone can be trained to be a novelist in the same way.

  William Gibson

  People, Way, Degrees

  Interview with Jesse Hicks, www.theverge.com. January 24, 2012.

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• The economy of a novelist is a little like that of a careful housewife who is unwilling to throw away anything that might perhaps serve its turn.

  Graham Greene

  Writing, Literature, Littles

  Graham Greene (1994). “In Search of a Character: Two African Journals”, Penguin USA

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

  Mohsin Hamid

  Writing, Researchers

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• For a novelist, it's kind of an onerous burden to represent an entire culture.

  Khaled Hosseini

  Culture, Kind, Burden

  "Khaled Hosseini, Kabul’s Splendid Son". Interview with Michael Mechanic, www.motherjones.com. May, 2009.

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• I like novelists who can create other interesting worlds.

  Kazuo Ishiguro

  Interesting, World

  "'For me, England is a mythical place'". Interview with Tim Adams, www.theguardian.com. February 19, 2005.

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• I know I'm a rare person, a trained scientist who writes fiction, because so few contemporary novelists engage with science.

  Barbara Kingsolver

  Writing, Rare Person, Fiction

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• Being a novelist and being a mother have exactly coincided in my life: the call from my agent saying that I had a contract for my first novel - that was on my answering phone message when I got back from the hospital with my first child.

  Barbara Kingsolver

  Mother, Children, Phones

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• The novelist teaches the reader to comprehend the world as a question. There is wisdom and tolerance in that attitude. In a world built on sacrosanct certainties the novel is dead.

  Milan Kundera

  Attitude, Tolerance, World

  "Siraaj: An Arab Tale". Book by Radwa Ashour, 2007.

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• If a person is not talented enough to be a novelist, not smart enough to be a lawyer, and his hands are too shaky to perform operations, he becomes a journalist.

  Norman Mailer

  Smart, Hands, Literature

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• I was a novelist first. But in the mid 80s, I did work in television for ten years. And yes, that was frequently the reaction to my scripts. People would say, you know, George, this is great. We love it, a terrific script, but it would cost five times our budget to shoot this.

  George R. R. Martin

  Years, People, Cost

  "'Thrones' Author George R.R. Martin Plays Not My Job". "Wait Wait... Don't Tell Me!" with Peter Sagal, www.npr.org. September 14, 2012.

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