Quotes About Novelists

Novelists liked to imagine the interconnectedness of things—as though all the people in the big city were part of some great organism, their lives intertwined. He

For the novelists in your life I have heard it said that it is better if you pretend they do something else and that it is always attended to, and doesn't need your attention in the slightest. And then when asked for support, muster an enormous enthusiasm.

America may have great poets and novelists, but she never will have more than one necromancer.

I put it to you that there are no British poets, there are no British novelists. I have heard myself described as one, but I think really I'm an English novelist; there are Scottish poets and Scottish novelists.

I suspect there are two kinds of novelists. Those who have a point of view and have something to say and then write a novel in order to say that thing, and those of us who write the book in order to find out what we think about that thing.

Novelists do not swing on the same pendulums as critics.

When the Romantic Novelists' Association was founded 35 years ago (in 1960) the image was of pink fluffy bimbos. Now, the view of life through rose-coloured spectacles has gone out of the window. A realistic background and certainly a more realistic relationship between a man and a woman are the important things.

Novelists who carefully deliver their coups de théâtre , artfully hold back their dividends (how much? fifteen per cent?), who wait till the end of their book to unveil the enigma, have always seemed to me like shopkeepers anxious not to lose a penny on their wares. (spoken by He)

James Salter has talents on the page we novelists would sell souls to the devil for.

We're currently living with a generation of established novelists who are embarrassingly out of date with respect to social networking, internet skills, and so on.

Money is the necessity that frees us from necessity. Of all novelists in any country, Trollope best understands the role of money. Compared with him even Balzac is a romantic.

Human nature provides the lyrics, and we novelists just compose the music.

I love the idea of trying to do the work of old-fashioned novelists of plotting and of really making you curious about what's going to happen next and all that, but also trying to load it up with your weird thoughts and opinions.

One reason I've hung on to book selling is that it's progressive—the opposite of writing, pretty much. Eventually all novelists, if they persist too long, get worse. No reason to name names, since no one is spared. Writing great fiction involves some combination of energy and imagination that cannot be energized or realized forever. Strong talents can simply exhaust their gift, and they do.

You sound so miserable.""All novelists are.

Most writers are not quick-witted when they talk. Novelists, in particular, drag themselves around in society like gut-shot bears.

history, when examined closely, always yields up people, events, and moral testing grounds more revealing than any but the greatest of novelists could invent.

She wonders how he will get out of the easy chair in a way that's remotely graceful. He'll stand to top up her wine, then perhaps hold her glass while he leans over to kiss her again. Novelists have this same problem, she thinks, Dickens and Austen and everyone since: how to get people in and out of rooms, up and out of chairs.

Novelists, when their characters drive cars, never feel compelled to describe precisely what the physical actions are of hands, feet, eyes, knees, elbows. Yet many of these same novelists, when their characters copulate, get into such detailed physical description you'd think they were writing an exercise book. We all know the interrelation between the right ankle and the accelerator when driving a car, and we needn't be told.

I cannot and do not live in the world of discretion, not as a writer, anyway. I would prefer to, I assure you - it would make life easier. But discretion is, unfortunately, not for novelists.

This led her to a consideration of how very difficult it must be for people to write novels, because all the young heroines were in the Forces or civilian jobs, and all the young heroes the same, so that there was very little time for novelists to make them fall in love with each other, unless they made the hero be a flying officer and the heroine a Waaf, and then one would have to know all the details of the R.A.F or one would make the most dreadful howlers.

It used to be that the highest ambition of American novelists was to write 'the Great American Novel,' that great white whale of American fiction that would encompass all the American experience in one great book.

We all now tell stories by cutting from one dramatic scene to the next, whereas Victorian novelists felt free to write long passages of undramatic summary.

I came to feel that, in addition to Imre Kertesz, Hungary has produced at least three contemporary novelists who deserve the Nobel: Peter Nadas, Peter Esterhazy and Laszlo Krasznahorkai.