Famous Quotes & Sayings

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.

Jane Smiley

Novelists never have to footnote.

Jane Smiley

The main thing about the novel that is totally fascinating: It's not possessed by the writer; it's possessed by the reader.

Edward Norton

A lot of why I do something is just the novelty of the experience.

Austin Grossman

Writing a novel was completely awesome because parts of it could suck and I could throw them away. I didn't have to know the ending until I got there.

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

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.

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.

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.

Edmond de Goncourt

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

Bonnie Jo Campbell

Eighty percent of all novels are bought by women, or so I've heard.

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.

Barbara Pym

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

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.

Ray Bradbury

In Hollywood, they think they know it all. You, as a writer, are essentially an outsider. Novelists and short-story writers, especially.

Irish novelist John Banville has a creepy, introverted imagination.

Alan Furst

Let me put it this way: I don't plan to retire. What would I do, become a brain surgeon? I mean, a brain surgeon can retire and write novels, but a novelist can't retire and do brain surgery - or at least he better not.

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.