Quotes of: Novelists Keyword

The American critic Dale Peck, author of Hatchet Jobs (2004), argues that reviewing finds its true character in critical GBH such as Fischer's [review of Martin Amis's Yellow Dog]. It represents a return to the prehistoric origins of reviewing in Zoi...

John Sutherland

The art of the novelist is not unrelated to the illness of multiple personality disorder. It's a much milder form. But the better the book, the nearer to the padded cell you are.

David Mitchell

The bicycle, the bicycle surely, should always be the vehicle of novelists and poets.

Parnassus on Wheels

Pundits always have something to write about; the novelist just has a blank screen.

Simon Mawer

One more recent novelist to come along is Cormac McCarthy. Him, I like.

Leslie Fiedler

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

Mary McCarthy

Novelists are in the business of constructing consciousness out of words, and that's what we all do, cradle to grave. The self is a story we tell.

James Gleick

I have tried very hard as a novelist to say, 'Novels are about individuals and especially larger than life individuals.'

Bharati Mukherjee

I don't like to read novels where the novelist tells me what to think about the situation and the characters. I prefer to discover for myself.

Frederick Wiseman

Every novelist has a different purpose - and often several purposes which might even be contradictory.

Irwin Shaw

I became fascinated by the fact that people write to give away rather than write to be read. It's the difference between playwrights and novelists.

David Suchet

A novelist has to know enough about a subject to fool the passenger next to him on an airplane.

David Foster Wallace

Miss Austen had shown the infinite possibilities of ordinary and present things for the novelist.

George Saintsbury

The idea of being a novelist is really romantic, but it's kind of the same as being president of the United States - it's not gonna happen.

Richard Paul Evans

What the best novels and novelists do is to offer a different way of seeing.

Aminatta Forna

I wanted to write about the Korean War, but I had no entry into it that made the kind of sense it needs to make for a novelist.

Chang-Rae Lee

Expansion. That is the idea the novelist must cling to. Not completion. Not rounding off, but opening out.

Aspects of the Novel

The real novelist, the perfectly simple human being, could go on, indefinitely imaging.

The Waves

At the meeting you behaves exactly as Marathi novelists of the last century tell is husbands do in sari shops.

Cobalt Blue

Darling, in this family we don't call anyone a novelist who has not written more books than Jane Austen.

Pansy Schneider-Horst

In Hollywood, they think they know it all. You, as a writer, are essentially an outsider. Novelists and short-story writers, especially.

Ray Bradbury