Famous Quotes & Sayings

Jose Saramago

I am a better novelist than a poet, playwright, or essayist.

Khaled Hosseini

For a novelist, it's kind of an onerous burden to represent an entire culture.

Khaled Hosseini

I also felt The Kite Runner was a story that would lend itself well to a visual retelling in a graphic novel.

Khaled Hosseini

The novel [The Kite Runner] came about as an expansion of that original, unpublished short story.

Heinrich Heine

Newness hath an evanescent beauty.

Hilary Mantel

I only became a novelist because I thought I had missed my chance to become a historian.

Anthony Burgess

A novelist should not be too intelligent either, although. . . he may be permitted to be an intellectual.

Richard Flanagan

After writing a novel, what is there to say? If a novelist could say it in a maxim, they wouldn't need 120,000 words, several years and sundry characters, plots and subplots, and so on. I'd much rather listen always.

Each and every novel is a world outside the world - for a reader to visit, for comfort, consolation, escape, or challenge.

Simon Mawer

Sometimes I think that novelists suffer from P.C.S.: Perpetual Childhood Syndrome.

Alice McDermott

Publishing a short story can sometimes feel like shouting into the dark... your words come out, and then nothing... but I don't think that's why I tend to write novels rather than stories.

Edmund White

A straight writer can write a gay novel and not worry about it, and a gay novelist can write about straight people.

Gore Vidal

Universities are filled with poets and novelists conducting demure and careful lives in imitation of Eliot and Forster and those others who (through what seems to be have been discretion) made it.

Gore Vidal

Southerners make good novelists: they have so many stories because they have so much family.

George Sand

Travelling is like a novel: it's what happens that counts.

Frank Norris

The function of the novelist... is to comment upon life as he sees it.

Francois Rabelais

It is the custom on Africa to always produce new and monstrous things. [Fr., Afrique est coustumiere toujours choses produire nouvelles et monstrueuses.]

George McGovern

I never even had the time to read novels.

Howard Gordon

In a novel, the relationship between writer and reader is such a pure one.

Howard Gordon

I guess I've always been an aspiring novelist. I went to Princeton and wrote a novel for my thesis.

Hortense Calisher

The novel is rescued life.

Friedrich Nietzsche

As soon as we are shown the existence of something old in a new thing, we are pacified.

George Bernard Shaw

It is clear that a novel cannot be too bad to be worth publishing. . . . It certainly is possible for a novel to be too good to be worth publishing.

Novelists can ask - they can ask for anything - but their books are their answers in advance.

Michael A. Stackpole

Authors can easily produce ebook versions of novels and shorter work which publishers don't own.

There's more to 'The Wizard of Oz' than just one movie. It's not just novelty cutesy things.

Rudolfo Anaya

In many respects, I think 'Bless Me, Ultima' is a novel about the indigenous.

Sarah Waters

I knew I'd always be a second-rate academic, and I thought, 'Well, I'd rather be a second-rate novelist or even a third-rate one'.

Mark Pellegrino

Not to disparage anything, but most vampire stories tend to be romance novels that are 'Twilight'-ish with metrosexual guys.

John Updike

A Christian novelist tries to describe the world as it is.

John Gordon Sinclair

I'm a big fan of Elmore Leonard, and I've read Ian Rankin, Christopher Brookmyre and so on. But I'd never read a crime novel that made me feel emotional at the end.

Ernst Mayr

The major novelty of my theory was its claim that the most rapid evolutionary change does not occur in widespread, populous species, as claimed by Most geneticists, but in small founder populations.

Mohsin Hamid

Only in novels can we take another human being into our head and create something jointly.