Famous Quotes & Sayings

David Mitchell

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

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

Billy Bob Thornton

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

Dean Koontz

Not all popular novelists are good, but all good novelists are, sooner or later, popular.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Curtis Sittenfeld

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

Ray Bradbury

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

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.

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.

Hilary Mantel

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

Simon Mawer

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

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.

Frank Norris

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

Howard Gordon

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

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

H. L. Mencken

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

Jonathan Kellerman

I would never have been a novelist without working as a psychologist...it was a great education in human nature.

Philip Levine

My temperament is not geared to that of a novelist.

Peter Morgan

To what degree are historians chroniclers of the truth and to what degree are they just novelists, frankly?

Peter Ackroyd

Freud was just a novelist.

Rachel Cusk

I'm a novelist, not a social scientist or a commentator.

John Banville

The novel is resilient, and so are novelists.

John Banville

Dostoevsky is such a bad writer it is hard to take him seriously as a novelist, though he is a wonderful philosopher.