Novelists Quotes

Novelists are in the education business...but they're not teaching you times tables, they are teaching you responsiveness and morality and to make nuanced judgments.  And really to just make the planet look a bit richer when you go out into the street.

There seems almost a general wish of decrying the capacity and undervaluing the labor of the novelist, and of slighting the performances which have only genius, wit, and taste to recommend them.

With a novelist, like a surgeon, you have to get a feeling that you've fallen into good hands—someone from whom you can accept the anesthetic with confidence.

The novelist is he who, having seen life, and being so excited by it that he absolutely must transmit his vision to others, chooses narrative fiction as the liveliest vehicle for the relief of his feelings.

When you're a novelist, you're writing a play but you're acting all the parts, you're controlling the lights and the scenery and the whole business, and it's your show.

Life, of course, is the basic raw material of all art, but no artist is so close to his raw material as the novelist.

I hold that the novelist is the historian of the present, just as the historian is the novelist of the past.

There are many reasons why novelists write, but they all have one thing in common—a need to create an alternative world.

Along with the peasant in the novelist, there must be a man with a whip.

Novelists do not write as birds sing, by the push of nature.  It is part of the job that there should be much routine and some daily stuff on the level of carpentry.

Novelists who write for a public are, in my opinion, no good; they've discovered who their readers are and, in submitting to their judgment, they're dishing things up like short-order cooks.

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.

They can't yank novelist like they can pitcher.  Novelist has to go the full nine, even if it kills him.

The novelist screws up his courage in order to invest another two or three years in another attempt to float a boat of original design upon an invented ocean.

The novelist teaches the reader to comprehend the world as a question.  There is wisdom and tolerance in that attitude.

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

In the compact between novelist and reader, the novelist promises to lie, and the reader promises to allow it.

A novelist these days has to be an ex-suicide.  A good novel...is possible only after one has given up and let go.

There may be times when the greatest service a novelist can do his fellow man is to follow General Patton's injunction: Attack, attack, attack.  Attack the false in the name of the real.

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

I am looking for the novelists whose writing is an extension of their intellect rather than an extension of their neurosis.