Quotes About Inspiration

I couldn't have been the novelist I was without being the journalist I was.

I get a lot of energy from making things up, which is why I feel I'm a novelist.

When I was a child, I loved making stories, so I thought maybe I would be a novelist.

I wouldn't sit down and work at writing a song like a novelist or something.

It's very lucky when you have an artist - whether it's a novelist or a filmmaker or a singer - whose career you can follow from the beginning and feel that you are in some way part of it, or part of the same world that it comes out of.

My dad was very successful as a journalist, so I didn't want to be one. I wanted to be a novelist.

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

I started writing short fiction very briefly, as I imagine is the case for some novelists.

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

Like all novelists, I'm interested in the filters between reality and the imagination.

It seemed to me you could do anything in comics. So I started doing my thing, which is mainly influenced by novelists, stand-up comedians, that sort of thing.

The novel is resilient, and so are novelists.

I saw novelists as being admirable people and I thought... I thought... maybe, one day, I could be one of them.

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

Many of the novelists I admire never left their hometown. Look at Flannery O'Connor. So many of the great Russians never left Russia. Shakespeare never left England. The list goes on.

Novelists should be free to write whatever they want, to let their imaginations roam as close to or as removed from reality as they see fit.

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.

Novelists seem to fall into two distinct categories - those that plan and those that just see where it takes them. I am very much the former category.

Love of place is one of the characteristics I enjoy most about novelists.

It feels like when novelists say they find their characters are doing things they never thought they'd do, the material comes alive, and that's how I feel making music.

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

'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.

I wrote about four novels before I wrote a word of journalism.