Famous Quotes & Sayings

May Sarton

I suppose I have written novels to find out what I thought about something and poems to find out what I felt about something.

Mason Cooley

The novelty we want is always close to the familiar.

Milan Kundera

For a novelist, a given historic situation is an anthropologic laboratory in which he explores his basic question: What is human existence?

Marcel Proust

Proust was the greatest novelist of the twentieth century, just as Tolstoy was in the nineteenth.

Eric Hoffer

To the old, the new is usually bad news.

Michel Faber

All my novels are about people who strive to heal and evolve.

George Bernard Shaw

It is the sexless novel that should be distinguished: the sex novel is now normal.

Taiye Selasi

As a novelist, I ask of myself only that I tell the truth and that I tell it beautifully.

Stephen King

I just saw myself as a novelist.

Stephen Vizinczey

You tell me your favorite novelists and I'll tell you whom you vote for, or whether you vote at all.

Sophie Kinsella

The great thing about being a novelist is that you organize your own day.

Thomas Hardy

The business of the poet and the novelist is to show the sorriness underlying the grandest things and the grandeur underlying the sorriest things.

Sarah Waters

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

Sara Paretsky

Around the time I turned 30, I wanted to publish a novel

Wole Soyinka

I don't really consider myself a novelist, it just came out purely by accident.

Wendell Berry

There is change by necessity or adaptation, and there is contrived change or novelty.

Salman Rushdie

I'm a novelist. Fortunately I don't have to rule the world.

Terry Pratchett

It was like being in a Jane Austen novel, but one with far less clothing.

Terence McKenna

Ultimate novelty must be a situation where all boundaries are dissolved.

Leslie Fiedler

One more recent novelist to come along is Cormac McCarthy. Him, I like.

Tom Perrotta

The lesson you have to learn as novelist is how to be collaborative, and how to say, "I don't get to dictate this."

Tom Sizemore

I read a lot. I am an inveterate reader. I always have a novel going.

Rita Mae Brown

Not until my middle thirties did I consider myself a novelist.

V. S. Pritchett

It is less the business of the novelist to tell us what happened than to show how it happened.

Steven Millhauser

God pity the poor novelist.

Richard Grossman

Salvation is an individual relationship with God. I've always considered myself to be a devotional poet, and I consider myself to be a devotional novelist.

Storm Jameson

The writer - more especially the novelist - who has not, at one moment or another, considered his publisher unworthy of him, has still to be conceived.

William Golding

However you disguise novels, they are always biographies.