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.

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

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.

Ellen Potter

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

Billy Bob Thornton

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

Denis Diderot

Only God and some few rare geniuses can keep forging ahead into novelty.

Dean Koontz

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

Elizabeth Hardwick

Now, my novel begins. No, now I begin my novel—and yet I cannot decide whether to call myself I or she.

Barbara Pym

She had always been an unashamed reader of novels ...

Godfrey Gao

'The Mortal Instruments' is based on a series of novels by Cassandra Clare; it has been a New York Times bestseller, so it is pretty popular.

Laurence Housman

On that other novels followed: but I still wrote fairy tales and dreamy poems of another world.

Anthony Zuiker

This won't be a novelty stunt where he opens the show up and disappears.

Graham Swift

The novel that's contemporary in the sense of being wholly 'of now' is an impossibility, if only because novels may take years to write, so the 'now' with which they begin will be defunct by the time they're finished.

Tobias Wolff

And you can tell the writers who do it - Robert Stone, for example, who with each new novel is doing something new. I appreciate that in other writers.

We're not going to get them just because they're a novelty item. We have to be responsible with our budget.

Ezra Taft Benson

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

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.

Rick Yancey

It's been a while since I've written a novel aimed at the adult market, but I never sit down and say to myself, 'Okay, now I'm going to write something for us old folks.' I get gripped by an idea, and I go where the idea takes me.

Alice Oswald

People are so used to reading novels now, they just read a poem straight through to get the meaning. And that's something totally different from the slow way you read something if it's a tune; which to me a poem has to be.

Alexander McCall Smith

With '44 Scotland Street' I found myself having to work out how a daily novel works, and it is completely different to a conventional novel.

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.

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.

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.