Quotes About Literature

I think that's the most important job of a novelist - to bring authority to their writing.

I'm not a biographer, I'm a novelist.

Freud was just a novelist.

I'm a middle-class, middle-brow novelist. And that's it. It amuses me.

I don't want to marry anybody, but I certainly wouldn't want to marry a bad novelist.

Like so many others, I came to romance during the golden age of it - Judith McNaught, Julie Garwood, Johanna Lindsey and Jude Deveraux were at the height of their historical domination. Without those women, I wouldn't be a romance novelist.

A novel I read when I was about 17 or 18 - 'The World According to Garp,' by John Irving - really made me want to become a writer. The character of Garp is a novelist, and at the time, the whole lifestyle of being a writer was hugely appealing to me.

I'm a novelist, and I'm a woman, and I'm considered to be a serious author whether I like it or not.

I've always wanted to be a novelist, so I just try to write really great narrative.

I wrote a novel, so now they can call me a novelist. I tell stories; that's it.

I'm not an especially male novelist, but I think men are better at writing about men, and the same is true for women. Reading Saul Bellow is a revelation, but he can't write women. There are exceptions, like Marilynne Robinson's 'Gilead,' but generally, I think it's true.

Uzodinma Iweala is a fine and confident novelist.

Among books, one of my early favorites was Gurunath Naik, a Marathi novelist. His mysteries were very popular in the 70s.

I think, in common with a lot of novelists, I wasn't the most athletic guy at school.

I have always loved short stories. I have been at least as influenced by the short story masters as I have been by novelists.

The novel is just fine: It's novelists who aren't doing so well.

God gets the great stories. Novelists must make do with more mundane fictions.

Anthony Powell was the most European of 20th-century British novelists.

It's with bad sentiments that one makes good novels.

I don't very often read novels.

The best novels are those that are important without being like medicine; they have something to say, are expansive and intelligent but never forget to be entertaining and to have character and emotion at their centre.

Even the best novels have their share of stinker lines.

'Great Expectations' was an important novel in my adolescence. It was very much one of those emblematic novels that made me wish I could write like that. It helped that my models as a writer were dead over a hundred years before I began to write.

When I do a novel, I don't really use the script, I use the book; when I did Apocalypse Now, I used Heart of Darkness. Novels usually have so much rich material.