Famous Quotes & Sayings

Billy Bob Thornton

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Dean Koontz

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

Ruth Rendell

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

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

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.'

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

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.

Rachel Cusk

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

Leslie Fiedler

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

V. S. Pritchett

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

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.

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."

Taiye Selasi

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

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.

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.

Rita Mae Brown

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

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.