Quotes About Novelists

I know I'm a rare person, a trained scientist who writes fiction, because so few contemporary novelists engage with science.

I had no idea Scotland Yard employed novelists these days," said Lord Bancroft coldly. "Of the penny dreadful variety, no less.

The thing I love about Dickens is the omniscient, omnipotent narrator, and the great confidence of the narrator, which marks 19th-century novelists in general and Dickens in particular.

Novelists have to love humanity to write anything worthwhile. Poets have to love themselves.

I don't know about lying for novelists. I look at some of the great novelists, and I think the reason they are great is that they're telling the truth. The fact is they're using made-up names, made-up people, made-up places, and made-up times, but they're telling the truth about the human being—what we are capable of, what makes us lose, laugh, weep, fall down, and gnash our teeth and wring our hands and kill each other and love each other.

Conspiracy members included several best-selling novelists, one of whom had popularized the amusing idea that instead of burning to death, vampires smelled like roses in the sun

Awful film adaptations follow novelists for the rest of their lives. An atrocious movie of 'We Need to Talk About Kevin' could have stigmatised the book, aggrieved the novel's fans, and blighted my reputation forever.

It is true that it is usually for their books that novelists reserve their most considered and ordered thoughts, but the fact is they arise inescapably from one consciousness: the same one that is occupied in all the other activities which make up a life.

Fifty years ago noted animal researcher Harry Harlow, in an address to the American Psychological Association, observed, "As far as love or affection is concerned, psychologists have failed in their mission…The little we write about it has been better written by poets and novelists.

You have seven writers in your basement?" Donald nods, signing, "They like it here. There's a poet, a couple of novelists, an opera librettist, an essay writer . . . . They don't usually make much trouble.

But the other Ministers considered that to employ a magician was one thing, novelists were quite another and they would not stoop to it.

Novelists... fashioning nets to sustain and support the reader as he falls helplessly through the chaos of his own existence.

Dreaming is the day job of novelists, but sharing our dreams is a still more important task for us. We cannot be novelists without this sense of sharing something.

Novelists are a special breed. They cannot genuinely trust anything they have not seen with their own eyes or touched with their own hands (Salon, 20 February 2009).

Thriller novelists get asked - berated, sometimes - about whether their work glorifies bad behavior, even, exploits human tragedy for entertainment.

Here's a secret. Many novelists, if they are pressed and if they are being honest, will admit that the finished book is a rather rough translation of the book they'd intended to write.

But she had a lively acquaintaince with confinement through the works of women novelists, especially those of the unmarried ones.

Flora was pleasantly surprised to hear this, and for a second wondered if the women novelists had been misinformed about confinements? But no: she recollected that they usually left themselves a loophole by occasionally creating a primitive woman, a creature who was as close to the earth as a bloomy greengage and rather like one to look at and talk to, and this greengage creature never had any bother with her confinements, but just took them in her stride, as it were.

Novelists who get shitty about screenwriting invariably can't do it, or they can't hack it in the world of what's really, in truth, very bold and very public enterprise.

My grandmother's first husband was a spiritualist medium. What fascinates me about that is the balance between conviction and sincerity and trickery, which is also something that novelists are very familiar with.

I had always thought that the idea of love at first sight was one of those things invented by lady novelists from the South with three names.

Young would-be novelists and poets believe that art is eternal. Au contraire: we are in the business of ephemera, the era of floating islands of trash, and most of the things we feel deeply and inscribe on the page will disappear.

The desert's illimitable freedom," the officer murmured, as he poured out Simon's whiskey. "It's not altogether her fault, Mr. Jackson. It's these damned novelists. Every novel written about the desert should be censored by the police.

Intellectuals, freelance writers, investigative journalists, and midlist novelists are the analog to the family farmers, who have always struggled but simply can't compete in this transformed economy.