Novelists Quotes - Page 25

I've been many kinds of writers in my career: novelist; tele-playwright; short story writer. As a high-school student, I wrote amateur pieces for fanzines, and I've written for Hollywood.

George R. R. Martin

School, Careers, Hollywood

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

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Things were easier for the old novelists who saw people all of a piece. Speaking generally, their heroes were good through and through, their villains wholly bad.

W. Somerset Maugham

Hero, Talking, People

"A Writer's Notebook" by W. Somerset Maugham, Country Life Press, (p. 196), 1949.

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The suspense in a novel is not only in the reader, but in the novelist himself, who is intensely curious too about what will happen to the hero.

Mary McCarthy

Hero, Suspense Novels, Curious

"On the Contrary".

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Novelists have to be adept at controlling the flow of information, and, most crucially, they have to be in charge of the narrative.

Ian Mcewan

Narrative, Information, Flow

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It is not the first duty of the novelist to provide blueprints for insurrection, or uplifting tales of successful resistance for the benefit of the opposition. The naming of what is there is what is important.

Ian Mcewan

Uplifting, Successful, Important

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Historian: an unsuccessful novelist.

H. L. Mencken

History, Historical, Unsuccessful

"A Mencken Chrestomathy". Book by H. L. Mencken, 1949.

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A novelist needs to know his own strong points and weak points.

David Mitchell

Strong, Needs, Weak Points

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I'm a novelist, that's how I make my livelihood, and I concentrate on the novels.

David Mitchell

Novel, Livelihood

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I am worrying about my country. I feel I have a responsibility as a novelist to do something.

Haruki Murakami

Country, Responsibility, Worry

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As a novelist, you could say that I am dreaming while I am awake, and every day I can continue with yesterday's dream. Because it is a dream, there are so many contradictions and I have to adjust them to make the story work. But, in principle, the original dream does not change.

Haruki Murakami

Dream, Yesterday, Principles

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For novelists or musicians, if they really want to create something, they need to go downstairs and find a passage to get into the second basement. What I want to do is go down there, but still stay sane.

Haruki Murakami

Musician, Needs, Want

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Sometimes I wonder why I'm a novelist right now. There is no definite career reason why I became a writer. Something happened, and I became a writer. And now I'm a successful writer.

Haruki Murakami

Successful, Careers, Reason Why

"Haruki Murakami: 'I took a gamble and survived'". Interview with Emma Brockes, www.theguardian.com. October 14, 2011.

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A novelist is, like all mortals, more fully at home on the surface of the present than in the ooze of the past.

Vladimir Nabokov

Home, Past, Surface

1964 Interview in Playboy, Jan.

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Happy is the novelist who manages to preserve an actual love letter that he received when he was young within a work of fiction, embedded in it like a clean bullet in flabby flesh and quite secure there, among spurious lives.

Vladimir Nabokov

Fiction, Letters, Flesh

Vladimir Nabokov (2012). “Speak, Memory: An Autobiography Revisited”, p.206, Penguin UK

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Manners are of such great consequence to the novelist that any kind will do. Bad manners are better than no manners at all, and because we are losing our customary manners, we are probably overly conscious of them; this seems to be a condition that produces writers.

Flannery O'Connor

Literature, Losing, Kind

Flannery O'Connor (1969). “Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose”, p.29, Macmillan

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To be true to life, a novel must have an ending that is inevitable given the specific personalities of the characters involved. The novelist must not impose an ending upon them.

Joyce Carol Oates

Character, Personality, True Life

"A Reader’s Guide to the Recent Novels of Joyce Carol Oates". Interview, celestialtimepiece.com.

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I saw novelists as being admirable people and I thought... I thought... maybe, one day, I could be one of them.

Michael Palin

People, One Day, Saws

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I'm a very good storyteller; I have a lot of compassion for people. That's very useful for a novelist. A lot of novelists are snots. They're just mean people. I'm not a terribly skilled stylist, nor do I want to be. I want a lot of people to read one of my stories and go, 'That was pretty cool.'

James Patterson

Mean, Compassion, People

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I know that books I have written will still resonate in 50 years - particularly 'My Sister's Keeper.' It has sold three million copies in the States alone. I strongly feel that, as a novelist, you have a platform and the ability to change people's minds.

Jodi Picoult

Book, Years, People

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A novelist who writes nothing for 10 years finds his reputation rising. Because I keep on producing books they say there must be something wrong with this fellow.

J. B. Priestley

Book, Writing, Years

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I can't promise that every child with learning differences will become a novelist, but I do think all children can become lifelong readers.

Rick Riordan

Children, Thinking, Differences

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I've always liked the idea that writing is a form of travel. And I started my writing career as a mystery novelist for adults.

Rick Riordan

Writing, Careers, Ideas

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If the novelist isn't surprised by where his book ends up, he or she probably hasn't written anything worth remembering.

Tom Robbins

Book, Remember, Ends

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Most novelists write about twisted lives.

Tom Robbins

Writing, Twisted

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Sometimes writing a novel is not unlike having a baby. You'd have to ask a female novelist to compare the pain.

Salman Rushdie

Baby, Pain, Writing

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