Famous Quotes & Sayings

David Mitchell

I'm a novelist, that's how I make my livelihood, and I concentrate on the novels.

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.

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.

Billy Bob Thornton

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

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.

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.

Orhan Pamuk

I think novelists should be disciplined and self-imposed working hours. I work a lot, but I don't feel that I'm working. I always feel that there is a child in me, healthy, and I'm playing.

Pearl Cleage

I didn't have a dream of being a press secretary, I had a dream of being a playwright; I had a dream of being a novelist and a poet.

Ruth Rendell

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

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.

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.

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.

Curtis Sittenfeld

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

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.

Anthony Burgess

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

Simon Mawer

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

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

P. G. Wodehouse

No novelists any good except me. Sovietski -- yah! Nastikoff -- bah! I spit me of zem all. No novelists anywhere any good except me. P. G. Wodehouse and Tolstoi not bad. Not good, but not bad. No novelists any good except me.

Nelson DeMille

Lawrence Kelter is an exciting new novelist, who reminds me of an early Robert Ludlum.

Philip Larkin

If you tell a novelist, 'Life's not like that', he has to do something about it. The poet simply replies, 'No, but I am.'

John Updike

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

Maria Semple

I must say, it was a lot easier writing novels than I thought it would be. I think it's because I'm a novelist at heart, and it took me a while to figure that out.

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'.

H. L. Mencken

Henry James would have been vastly improved as a novelist by a few whiffs of the Chicago stockyard.

Frank Norris

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

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.