Famous Quotes & Sayings

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.

Neel Mukherjee

I start with theory rather than people. I don't like novels which have no theoretical or philosophical underpinning. I hate the contemporary novel where people just sit and talk to each other about their relationships.

Natsuo Kirino

I started writing juvenile novels around 1985. I never really thought of it as a career, but more as a way to make a living.

Edmund White

I didn't get anything published until I was thirty-three, and yet I'd written five novels and six or seven plays. The plays, I should point out, were dreadful.

Deborah Moggach

My first novel, 'You Must be Sisters,' was started in Pakistan. I've wrote several novels and a TV drama set or partly-set there.

Alan Furst

Spy novels are traditionally about lone wolves, but how many people actually live like that?

Eleanor Catton

When I was writing 'The Luminaries,' I read a lot of crime novels because I wanted to figure out which ones made me go, 'Ah! I didn't know that was coming!'

Ezra Taft Benson

Many novels and modern publications are corrupters of morals or distorters of truth.

Carl Barks

I read some of my stories recently and thought, 'How in the hell did I get away with that?' I had some really raw cynicism in some of them.

C. S. Lewis

But he always licked to get visitors alone in the billiard room and tell them stories about a mysterious lady, a foreign royalty, with whom he had driven about London. 'A devilish temper she had,' he would say. 'But she was a dem fine woman, sir, a dem fine woman.

Charles Dickens

Marley was dead, to begin with ... This must be distintly understood, or nothing wonderful can come of the story I am going to relate.

Sandra Cisneros

One of my favorite writers is Hans Christian Anderson. His stories speak to the times.

Brent Spiner

Hollywood has more than its share of harsh and crewel stories. In fact, it's probably more the norm than the exception.

Bret Easton Ellis

Exploitation is a harsh word, I know that, but on a certain level, to me that is the central Hollywood story.

Diane Setterfield

Everybody has a story. It's like families. You might not know who they are, might have lost them, but they exist all the same. You might drift apart or you might turn your back on them, but you can't say you haven't got them. Same goes for stories.

Diane Setterfield

A birth is not really a beginning. Our lives at the start are not really our own but only the continuation of someone else's story.

Diane Setterfield

A story so cherished it has to be dressed in casualness to disguise its significance in case the listener turned out to be unsympathetic.

Mark Noll

When I'm thinking like a historian, I tend to be a little depressed. But when I'm thinking like a Christian, I tend to be optimistic.

John Updike

A seventeenth-century house tends to be short on frills like hallways and closets; you must improvise.

John Updike

The writers we tend to universally admire, like Beckett, or Kafka, or TS Eliot, are not very prolific.

Laila Robins

A lot of times you come against actors who come from a different direction, and you tend to meet in the middle.

James Salter

West Pointers tend to be rigorously honest - more than necessary, in my view.

Nina Hoss

In Germany, actors tend to be more laid-back and take orders from the director: 'Tell me what you want.' I'm more into collaboration. So are Americans.

Laurie Helgoe

I am very troubled by the tendency to define introverts by what they lack. Introversion is a preference, not a fallback plan.

Timothy Noah

Moderates tend more than ideologues to be other-directed types who respond to external pressure.

Andy Serkis

When we, as humans, articulate, our tongues tend to hit the back of the teeth.