Novelists Quotes - Page 40

• I'm easily persuaded that a really good novelist who gets inside somebody else's head could be serving a valuable purpose. I enjoy satirical novels that take a wry, humorous, ironic look at modern life.

  Richard Dawkins

  Humorous, Ironic, Modern Life

  Source: newrepublic.com

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• I think I'm like most novelists in that my books have gotten farther and farther away from autobiography the longer I've been writing them.

  Anna Quindlen

  Book, Writing, Thinking

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• I think what saved me, as a writer, is that there are really two breaking points in my life. One was when I was 19 and my mother died, and one was when I was 31 and my first child was born. And that sort of gave me a kind of rebirth that I think has been invaluable to me as a novelist, in terms of seeing the world anew.

  Anna Quindlen

  Mother, Children, Thinking

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• I always wanted to be a fiction writer, but I couldn't figure out how you could be a novelist and make any money, which continues to be a problem for novelists the world over.

  Anna Quindlen

  Fiction, World, Problem

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• I do think there's some aspect of being a novelist that is a little crazy making.

  Anna Quindlen

  Crazy, Thinking, Littles

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• The thing I love about Dickens is the omniscient, omnipotent narrator, and the great confidence of the narrator, which marks 19th-century novelists in general and Dickens in particular.

  Elizabeth Gilbert

  Things I Love, Narrators, Century

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• I had, like any other young novelist, started out by believing the difficult thing was to get published and that, once you managed that, well, your financial problems were over. I discovered, like any other serious novelist, that actually they had only just begun.

  Mordecai Richler

  Believe, Financial Problems, Serious

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• Sometimes someone will tell me about an author I've never heard of before and that will send me to that person. That's how I discovered Thomas Bernhard, an Austrian novelist whose novels tend to be one long rant.

  Stephen Dobyns

  Long, Sometimes, Rant

  Source: www.bostonglobe.com

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• There were several points where I would kind of turn to the book and say, "Get thee behind me." I don't think real novelists do that. But I make a distinction between prose that's very efficiency-minded (like, the minimum I can get away with), versus loosening the screws and letting the words spill out beautifully and so on.

  George Saunders

  Real, Book, Thinking

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

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• I know to argue against our online lives seems like the argument of the grumpy, old Luddite novelist, but I really always try to make the argument from the perspective of personal pleasure.

  Zadie Smith

  Perspective, Trying, Arguing

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

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• I reluctantly signed up for a journalism major, thinking I needed a fall-back way to make money should my career as a novelist fail to take off. As I started to try on journalism, including doing internships and working at the campus paper, I found I actually liked it. So I started to want to be a journalist.

  Kevin Maney

  Fall, Thinking, Careers

  Source: bobmorris.biz

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• From about ninth grade on, I knew I was a writer at heart. I had fantasies of being a great novelist, but I thought that seemed like an iffy way to try to make a living. So I tried journalism while in college, and really liked it. But even in journalism, I've always pursued ways to be somewhat literary, whether writing a column or writing books.

  Kevin Maney

  Book, Writing, Heart

  Source: bobmorris.biz

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• For me, it is about using everything that is there and using the gaps in the record, figuring out why the gaps might be there. And then when you move on to the level of what historians said, laying the interpretations side by side. You also have to look back at the documents and make your own judgments. What the record says and what people say about it. A novelist can fill the gaps in a way that a biographer cannot.

  Hilary Mantel

  Moving, People, Looks

  Source: newrepublic.com

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• When I began to read as an adult, my first big enthusiasm was Evelyn Waugh. I read almost exclusively novelists of a generation back. I did the Russians, then I started getting more up to date.

  Hilary Mantel

  Adults, Generations, Enthusiasm

  Source: newrepublic.com

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• Maybe with "Californication" the character was partly based on Rick Moody. I read him and Jay McInerney, the templates for this bad boy novelist.

  David Duchovny

  Character, Boys, Bad Boy

  Source: www.bostonglobe.com

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• I think I'm someone who can prattle on a long time about something, which serves me well as a novelist, but it's the enemy when I'm writing short stories.

  Maggie Shipstead

  Writing, Thinking, Long

  Source: therumpus.net

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• No poet or novelist wishes he were the only one who ever lived, but most of them wish they were the only one alive, and quite a number fondly believe their wish has been granted.

  W. H. Auden

  Life, Believe, Writing

  Dyer's Hand (1963) "Writing"

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• The historian will tell you what happened. The novelist will tell you what it felt like.

  E. L. Doctorow

  Ragtime, Historian, Happened

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

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• Sigmund Freud was a novelist with a scientific background. He just didn't know he was a novelist. All those damn psychiatrists after him, they didn't know he was a novelist either.

  John Irving

  Umpires, Surfing, Damn

  "Writers at Work: The Paris Review Interviews (Eighth Series)". Book edited by George Plimpton, 1988.

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• A filmmaker has almost the same freedom as a novelist has when he buys himself some paper.

  Stanley Kubrick

  Paper, Filmmaker

  Biography/Personal Quotes, www.imdb.com.

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• For a novelist, a given historic situation is an anthropologic laboratory in which he explores his basic question: What is human existence?

  Milan Kundera

  Historic, Given, Existence

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• In effect I am not a novelist, but rather a failed essayist who started to write novels because he didn't know how to write essays.

  Jose Saramago

  Writing, Essays, Essayists

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• The painter paints, the musician makes music, the novelist writes novels. But I believe that we all have some influence, not because of the fact that one is an artist, but because we are citizens.

  Jose Saramago

  Believe, Writing, Artist

  "Still a street-fighting man". Interview with Stephanie Merritt, www.theguardian.com. April 30, 2006.

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• I hate this word 'graphic novel.' It is a term publishing houses have created for the bourgeois so they wouldn't be ashamed of buying comics... I'm not a graphic novelist. I am a cartoonist and I make comics and I am very happy about it.

  Marjane Satrapi

  Hate, Publishing House, Buying

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• The novelist, quite rightly, fears the psychoanalyst as both an enemy and a usurper.

  Will Self

  Enemy, Usurpers

  "Incidents along the road" by Will Self, www.theguardian.com. February 06, 2009.

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