Novelist Quotes

If a person is not talented enough to be a novelist, not smart enough to be a lawyer, and his hands are too shaky to perform operations, he becomes a journalist. (Norman Mailer)
No poet or novelist wishes he were the only one who ever lived, but most of them wish they were the only one alive, and quite a number fondly believe their wish has been granted. View quote
W. H. Auden
Historian: an unsuccessful novelist. View quote
H. L. Mencken
A novelist could probably run a military campaign with some success. They could certainly run a country. View quote
Colm Tóibín
A novelist may lose his readers for a few pages; a playwright never dares lose his audience for a minute. View quote
Terence Rattigan
As a novelist, I have a somewhat higher soapbox to stand on than most people do when it comes to talking back to the merchants of fear. View quote
L. Neil Smith
Sigmund Freud was a novelist with a scientific background. He just didn't know he was a novelist. All those damn psychiatrists after him, they didn't know he was a novelist either. View quote
John Irving
The historian will tell you what happened. The novelist will tell you what it felt like. View quote
E. L. Doctorow
I'm a failed poet. Maybe every novelist wants to write poetry first, finds he can't and then tries the short story which is the most demanding form after poetry. And failing at that, only then does he take up novel writing. View quote
William Faulkner
The difference between a novelist and a historian is this: that the former tells lies deliberately and for the fun of it; the historian tells lies in his simplicity and imagines he is telling the truth. View quote
Halldór Laxness
If the novelist shares his or her problems with the characters, he or she is able to study his personal unconscious. (Manuel Puig)
The essayist has to follow a certain intellectual pattern. The novelist has the advantage of using fantasy, of being subjective. View quote
Manuel Puig
To sing a song is quite different than to write a poem. I'm not and never will be a novelist, but to write a novel is not the same thing as writing a play. There is a difference in form, but essentially what you're after is the same thing. View quote
Sam Shepard
A novelist has two lives-- a reading and writing life, and a lived life. he or she cannot be understood at all apart from this. View quote
Jane Smiley
Yes, but also one of the problems for a novelist in Ireland is the fact that there are no formal manners. I mean some people have beautiful manners but there's no kind of agreed form of manners. View quote
John McGahern
He had no wish to obliterate anything he had written, but he would dearly have liked to revise it, envying painters, who are allowed to return to the same theme time and time again, clarifying and enriching until they have done all they can with it. A novelist is condemned to provide a succession of novelties, new names for characters, new incidents for his plots, new scenery; but, Mr Pinfold maintained, most men harbour the germs of one or two books only; all else is professional trickery of which the most daemonic of the masters - Dickens and Balzac even - were flagrantly guilty. View quote
Evelyn Waugh
As a novelist, I tell stories and people give me money. Then financial planners tell me stories and I give them money. View quote
Martin Cruz Smith
Whether he be an original or a plagiarist, man is the novelist of himself. View quote
José Ortega y Gasset
To speak today of a famous novelist is like speaking of a famous cabinetmaker or speedboat designer. Adjective is inappropriate to noun. View quote
Gore Vidal
The advantage, the luxury, as well as the torment and responsibility of the novelist, is that there is no limit to what he may attempt as an executant - no limit to his possible experiments, efforts, discoveries, successes. View quote
Henry James
But I have seen my obstacles: trivialities, learning and poetry. This last needs explaining: the old artist's readiness to dissolve characters into a haze. Characters cannot come alive and fight and guide the world unless the novelist wants them to remain characters. (E. M. Forster)
It is not the first duty of the novelist to provide blueprints for insurrection, or uplifting tales of successful resistance for the benefit of the opposition. The naming of what is there is what is important. View quote
Ian McEwan
A novelist who ranks with Proust, Kafka, Musil and his friend James Joyce as one of the enduring pillars of Modernism. View quote
Italo Svevo
One realizes that human relationships are the tragic necessity of human life; that they can never be wholly satisfactory, that every ego is half the time greedily seeking them, and half the time pulling away from them. In those simple relationships of loving husband and wife, affectionate sisters, children and grandmother, there are innumerable shades of sweetness and anguish which make up the pattern of our lives day by day, though they are not down in the list of subjects from which the conventional novelist works. View quote
Willa Cather
The higher processes are all processes of simplification. The novelist must learn to write, and then he must unlearn it; just as the modern painter learns to draw, and then learns when utterly to disregard his accomplishment, when to subordinate it to a higher and truer effect. View quote
Willa Cather