Famous Quotes & Sayings

Donna Leon

I never know what's going to happen in a novel. I don't have a plan or an outline.

Don DeLillo

One connection I see between novelists and terrorists is that we both attempt to alter consciousness.

Don DeLillo

I'm a novelist, period. An American novelist.

Don DeLillo

What terrorists gain, novelists lose.

Cory Doctorow

Novels for me are how I find out what's going on in my own head. And so that's a really useful and indeed critical thing to do when you do as many of these other things as I do.

Curtis Sittenfeld

Personally, I have never wished I were a male novelist.

Anne Enright

A novel is written not to be judged, but experienced.

Amos Oz

Almost without exception, my novels are rooted in Israel because that's the place I know well.

Amos Oz

All my novels are rooted in their time and in their place.

Andre Maurois

Novelty, the most potent of all attractions, is also the most perishable.

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.

Bonnie Jo Campbell

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

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.

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.

Ruth Rendell

There are some novelists who can get away with writing about sex - Philip Roth, Ian McEwan - but they are rare.

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.

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.

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.

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

Carol Shields

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

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.