Novelists Quotes - Page 29

• By the respectable terms of the modern literary profession, novelists do not preach. And, in fact, there has probably not been a less respectable novelist among the irrefutably enduring writers of our time than Ayn Rand: philosopher queen of the best-seller lists in the forties and fifties, cult phenomenon and nationally declared threat to public morality in the sixties, guru to the Libertarians and to White House economic policy in the seventies, and a continuing exemplar or Wilde's tragic observation that more than half of modern culture depends on what one shouldn't read.

  Claudia Roth

  Queens, White, House

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• Tony Vigorito has grown a cult following of thousands for one reason - his stuff is fun to read... It's... filled with the freshness and the freewheeling independence that made his reputation... This book is the 'work' of one of the least pretentious and most enjoyable to read novelists at play in America today.

  Kris Saknussemm

  Fun, Book, Play

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• A novelist has a specific poetic license which also applies to his own life.

  Jerzy Kosinski

  Poetic License, Poetic, License

  Jerzy Kosinski (2012). “Oral Pleasure: Kosinski as Storyteller: Kosinski as Storyteller”, p.269, Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

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• There's a unique bond of trust between readers and authors that I don't believe exists in any other art form; as a reader, I trust a novelist to give me his or her best effort, however flawed.

  Dan Simmons

  Trust, Art, Believe

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• The essayist has to follow a certain intellectual pattern. The novelist has the advantage of using fantasy, of being subjective.

  Manuel Puig

  Intellectual, Literature, Patterns

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• Many novelists take well-defined, precise characters, whose stories are sometimes of mediocre interest, and place them in an important historical context, which remains secondary in spite of everything.

  Raymond Queneau

  Character, Historical, Important

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• I would never have been a novelist without working as a psychologist...it was a great education in human nature.

  Jonathan Kellerman

  Human Nature, Psychologist, Great Education

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• Yes, but also one of the problems for a novelist in Ireland is the fact that there are no formal manners. I mean some people have beautiful manners but there's no kind of agreed form of manners.

  John McGahern

  Beautiful, Mean, People

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• The best of our fiction is by novelists who allow that it is as good as they can give, and the worst by novelists who maintain that they could do much better if only the public would let them.

  James M. Barrie

  Giving, Fiction, Worst

  "The Contemporary Review" Magazine, 1891.

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• America may have great poets and novelists, but she never will have more than one necromancer.

  Rebecca Harding Davis

  America, May, Poet

  Rebecca Harding Davis (1904). “Bits of Gossip”

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• Drawing Dead is a brilliant noir from one of Australia's most exciting new novelists.

  Adrian McKinty

  Drawing, Australia, Noir

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• You get spoiled as a novelist because you get to be the director and the editor, and you play all the parts, but as a screenwriter, you are a bit down the ladder.

  Jo Nesbo

  Editors, Play, Directors

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• I do not think men have more talent. There are a great many women in the arts; novelists, painters, sculptors, poets-but the proportion is far lower in the field of song writing.

  Dorothy Fields

  Song, Art, Writing

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• I resist when someone calls me a novelist: it implies some kind of inherent superiority of the novel. I'm not a novelist, I'm a writer.

  Aleksandar Hemon

  Kind, Call Me, Inherent

  "Life before loss". Interview with Sophie Harrison, www.theguardian.com. August 29, 2008.

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• Most writers are not quick-witted when they talk. Novelists, in particular, drag themselves around in society like gut-shot bears.

  Kurt Vonnegut

  Society, Bears, Drag

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• When they can't win a debate (can they ever?), leftists deploy what the late novelist/philosopher Ayn Rand called the argument from intimidation. Instead of trying to refute the other side, they label their opponents' position evil, attribute sinister motives to its adherents, and charge that its proponents are encouraging violence.

  Don Feder

  Winning, Evil, Trying

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• I had thought of writing, actually, and that later on I'd be a novelist.

  Francois Truffaut

  Writing

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• 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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