Novelist Quotes - page 3

I want to be a popular novelist who's also serious, or a serious novelist who's also very accessible. (Douglas Kennedy)

A novelist has a specific poetic license which also applies to his own life.

Jerzy Kosinski

All novels are about crime. You'd be hard pressed to find any novel that does not have an element of crime. I don't see myself as a crime novelist, but there are crimes in my books. That's the nature of storytelling, if you want to reflect the real world.

Carl Hiaasen

I never see a novel as a film while I'm writing it. Mostly because novels and films are so different, and I'm such an internal novelist.

Alice Hoffman

I wanted nothing less than to be a fiction writer when I was a kid. If you had told me I would be an artist or novelist when I grew up, I would have laughed in your face.

Caleb Carr

I'm always determined that as a novelist I'm going to go out there and research my characters very thoroughly before I start writing.

Chris Cleave

Playing with different genres and perspectives and ways of telling stories is one of the perks of being a novelist, but at the same time, I want precision. And in order to be precise about stuff, you have to get personal. Symbolism is very boring.

Linn Ullmann

As a novelist, there are three phone calls you never expect to receive in your lifetime because if you waited for them you would grow despairing - one calling from Stockholm with a Swedish accent, one from the NBA, and one from Oprah Winfrey.

Chris Bohjalian

A novelist can't be without a kimono and pen!(Shigure)

Natsuki Takaya

God pity the poor novelist.

Steven Millhauser

Manners are of such great consequence to the novelist that any kind will do. Bad manners are better than no manners at all, and because we are losing our customary manners, we are probably overly conscious of them; this seems to be a condition that produces writers. (Flannery O’Connor)

With the marketing pressures driving the book world today, it's much easier to get the author of a memoir on a television show than a serious novelist.

David Halberstam

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.

Beth Henley

All my siblings became artists. One's a novelist, my brother is a painter, my sister was a costume designer.

Caio Fonseca

After I convinced them that I was a harmless novelist, I actually got them to give me a tour of the harem - which is usually off limits for tourists.

Dorothy Dunnett

I don't like to read novels where the novelist tells me what to think about the situation and the characters. I prefer to discover for myself.

Frederick Wiseman

The novelist must look on humanity without partiality or prejudice. His sympathy, like that of the historian, must be unbounded, and untainted by sect or party.

Goldwin Smith

The materials of the novelist must be real; they must be gathered from the field of humanity by his actual observation.

Goldwin Smith

Every 'Observer' writer wants to be a novelist.

Jared Kushner

Jane Austen was an extraordinary woman; to actually be able to survive as a novelist in those days - unmarried - was just unheard of.

Julie Walters

I never met anybody in my life who says, I want to be a critic. People want to be a fireman, poet, novelist. (Leslie Fiedler)

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

Leslie Fiedler

My temperament is not geared to that of a novelist.

Philip Levine

Richard Wright, an American novelist of the realist school, asks a famous unfathomable question in his best-known novel, Native Son. Who knows when some slight shock, he asks, disturbing the delicate balance between social order and thirsty aspiration, shall send the skyscrapers in our cities toppling?

Daniel Handler

Since I became a novelist I have discovered that I am biased. Either I think a new novel is worse than mine and I don't like it, or I suspect it is better than my novels and I don't like it.

Umberto Eco

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