Novelists Quotes - Page 30

• Let’s hope the institution of marriage survives its detractors, for without it there would be no more adultery and without adultery two thirds of our novelists would stand in line for unemployment checks.

  Peter S. Prescott

  Writing, Two, Would Be

  4 Copy quote

• Don't be a novelist --- be a statistician. Much more scope for the imagination.

  Darrell Huff

  Imagination, Scope, Statistician

  19 Copy quote

• Just as the painter thinks with his brush and paints the novelist thinks with his story.

  W. Somerset Maugham

  Thinking, Fiction, Stories

  4 Copy quote

• Among the many problems which beset the novelist, not the least weighty is the choice of the moment at which to begin his novel.

  Vita Sackville-West

  Writing, Choices, Problem

  Vita Sackville-West (2015). “Vita Sackville-West: Selected Writings”, p.352, Macmillan

  5 Copy quote

  Show source

• 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.

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• 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

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  6 Copy quote

• 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

  7 Copy quote

• 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

  5 Copy quote

• 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

  7 Copy quote

• 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

  4 Copy quote

• 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.

  5 Copy quote

  Show source

• 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

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  11 Copy quote

• 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

  5 Copy quote

• 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.

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• 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

• 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