Famous Quotes & Sayings

Charles Dickens

Novelties please less than they impress.

David Shields

My medium is prose, not the novel.

David Mitchell

For me, novels coalesce into being, rather than arrive fully formed.

David Mitchell

I'm a novelist, that's how I make my livelihood, and I concentrate on the novels.

David Quammen

I used to read only fiction. Now I don't read much, only occasionally, such as a Cormac McCarthy or a Jim Harrison novel.

Edmond de Goncourt

History is a novel that has been lived, a novel is history that could have been.

David Hume

Such is the nature of novelty that where anything pleases it becomes doubly agreeable if new; but if it displeases, it is doubly displeasing on that very account.

Audrey Tautou

When you decide to adapt some Russian novel, it's like everyone knows about it but nobody has read it.

Carol Shields

This is why I read novels: so I can escape my own unrelenting monologue.

David Mitchell

I'm a novelist, that's how I make my livelihood, and I concentrate on the novels.

Beth Henley

But here's the thing: what you do as a screenwriter is you sell your copyright. As a novelist, as a poet, as a playwright, you maintain your copyright

Billy Bob Thornton

I'm more influenced by novelists than I am by filmmakers.

Dean Koontz

Not all popular novelists are good, but all good novelists are, sooner or later, popular.

Aleksandar Hemon

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.

A. S. Byatt

I am not an academic who happens to have written a novel. I am a novelist who happens to be quite good academically.

Kurt Vonnegut

I think I belong to America's last generation of novelists. Novelists will come one by one from now on, not in seeming families, and will perhaps write only one or two novels, and let it go at that.

Jane Smiley

A novelist is on the cusp between someone who knows everything and someone who knows nothing.

Jane Smiley

Novelists never have to footnote.

Cheyenne Jackson

Nobody is ever just a straight up protagonist or antagonist - everybody's morally ambiguous.

Matt Lauer

Making sure you're on the straight and narrow?

Douglas Alexander

I think politicians who suggest they are uninterested in the support of newspapers are not being straight with people.

Kathleen McCarthy

When you see it straight on, it collapses into a straight line. And from the side, it will look voluminous.

Ang Lee

I find it hard to deliver straightforward things.

Carol Berg

Write. Write. Write. Learn how to revise. No story is perfect straight from the keyboard.

Pierce Brosnan

I can still run in a straight line, and I can still throw a punch.

Rochelle Cancienne

We can't get a straight answer. There's just a lot of unknowns right now.

Ron Polk

A lot of things need to go right to win 14 straight times. But I think a lot of it isn't because we've been lucky. A lot of it has been because we've been pretty good.