Famous Quotes & Sayings

Edward Everett Hale

Make it your habit not to be critical about small things.

Mason Cooley

The critical spirit never knows when to stop meddling.

Mario Vargas Llosa

There are many things behind a good novel, but in particular there is a lot of work - a lot of patience, a lot of stubbornness, and a critical spirit.

Friedrich Schiller

Stubbornness is not firmness.

Lauren Conrad

A lot of my branding has come from stubbornness - I knew what I liked. I knew what I wanted to do.

Carol Shields

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

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.

Ellen Potter

I don't plot my novels - I move along with my characters.

John Irving

I find screenplays easy to write, my novels being very visual. You see what people look like. The physical action is described.

Jane Smiley

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