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 Sedaris

I always knew I wanted it to be illustrated.

David Ruffin

I knew I always wanted to sing.

Earl Campbell

I always knew that I wanted to do something in business and I prepared myself for that.

Charlize Theron

I've always known I wanted a family.

Bernard Marcus

When I understood the rudiments of what nanotech was all about, I knew I wanted to participate.

Diane Abbott

I wanted my marriage to work, but it didn't.

Diane von Furstenberg

I was fortunate to become the woman I always wanted to be.

Diane von Furstenberg

I always knew the woman I wanted to be.

Brigitte Bardot

I wanted to be myself. Only myself.

Eric Brown

Made it as a writer'? I'm still wondering if I've made it as a writer. I've made it as a published writer of the type of SF that I want to write and read, but I'm still waiting for that big breakthrough.

Nick Earls

I wrote my first novel-length story when I was 14 but had no idea what to do with it. Brisbane was a long way from the publishing industry then. Nowhere's a long way from the publishing industry now.

Denise Mina

There are a lot of bottlenecks to getting published. Publishers are only one of them. Having the time is another one. Feeling entitled is another one.

Kate Thompson

Writers want publicity all the time, and they are always nagging their agents and publishers to give them more publicity, but, when you get it, it's kind of soul-destroying.

Mark Helprin

Barnes & Noble is able to publish price-reduced non-copyrighted works not so much because it saves the 10 percent to 15 percent of revenue that would go to the gruel-eating authors, but because it saves the 50 percent that would go to the publishers.

Anna Chlumsky

First, I was a fact checker for Zagat and then I was an editorial assistant for HarperCollins publishing house.

Daniel Berrigan

I was publishing when I was 20, 21. And it really never stopped.

Chuck Palahniuk

All major publishing houses have these big fat biographies sitting there, waiting for people to die. All you have to do is slap on the end and put in on the market. It's that kind of commoditization and completion of your life before you die - and this kind of imposition of a public idea of self that replaces the actual living self - that I find so frightening.

Isabel Allende

I speak English and Spanish. I write in Spanish; my books are published in English.