Quotes About Novelists

Everyone assumes that novelists are smarter and more interesting. They're generally smarter and more interesting, but they're often very short. So it kind of cancels all the smart and interesting stuff out.

Wait, that's your idea? That's your expert advice? You're going to tell these novelists to just keep going? You're going to tell these honest, earnest writers: You gotta have faith? Those are George Michael lyrics, asshole. If they wanted that pep talk, they could just hang out inside a mall elevator.

Science fiction writers and thriller writers and traditional so-called 'literary' novelists are all novelists, and they finally have to be judged on how good they are, not on which category they belong in.

I would love to see young writers come out of college and know there is a possibility to be a novelist.

For novelists, the imagination is everything. The trick is to guide one's imagination using research. I love using old maps. When I wrote my novels on London and New York, I found wonderful historical atlases. Paris has the most lavish maps of all.

A true nature is a gloomy monolith, sort of like that old black rotary phone that I had to sing 'Happy Birthday' to Grandpa on. But novelists, damn us, still need true natures - so we can give them to our protagonists. And so readers can vaguely predict how they'll behave when we trap them in 'situations' that they can't IM their way out of.

The truth is that I know very few novelists who have been satisfied with the adaptation of their books for the screen.

Novelists always set up obstacles for lovers to overcome to make their eventual union all the more sastisfying, but Gomberville portrays love as a long, tedious ocean voyage to someplace miserable.

Novelists in particular love to rhapsodize about the glory of the solitary mind; this is natural, because their job requires them to sit in a room by themselves for years on end. But for most of the rest of us, we think and remember socially.

Somehow we must reintegrate the scientific with the popular and reconnect the future to the present. This is less a job for scientists, engineers, bureaucrats, and administrators and more a job for novelists, moviemakers, popularizers, and politicians.

You will also find authors who do not know the difference between theory and practice, just as there are novelists who do not know the difference between fiction and sociology.

Historians do not have the imaginative freedoms of fiction writers, but we can learn from novelists' efforts to imagine other ways of seeing. More engagement with the environmental humanities, which try to gaze on the agency and interconnectivity of all things, will help.

I am grateful to that unhappy childhood because it provided ample material for my writing. I don't know how novelists with happy childhoods in normal homes manage

Beginning in the 1920s and 1930s, film has been a shadow thrown over the minds of all novelists. Ever since, novelists have strained to make themselves more relevant and, whether consciously or not, novel-writing has been influenced by cinematic doctrines - by turns, embracing and defying it.

Kingsley Amis was one of a trio of brilliant comic novelists who made English literature sparkle in the twentieth century.

For purposes of marketing, writers are designated as poets, novelists, or something else. But writing is about matchmaking, an attempt to marry sensations with apt words.

All novelists I speak to about how they started usually say it was by pulling up their roots and going to live somewhere else. You see the shape of your life at a distance.

We really should stop taking historical novelists seriously as historians. The idea that they have authority is ludicrous. They are very good at imagining character: that's why the novels sell. They have no authority when it comes to the handling of historical sources. Full stop.

All I want is for someone to understand me before I die. With death staring me in the face, I finally understand the reason novelists write books: before they die they want somebody, somewhere, to understand them.

On the other hand, novels which are works of the imagination, though not of a very high order, have been for years a wonderful relief and pleasure to me, and I often bless all novelists. A surprising number have been read aloud to me, and I like all if moderately good, and if they do not end unhappily—against which a law ought to be passed.

I am looking for the novelists whose writing is an extension of their intellect rather than an extension of their neurosis.

On some level, most novelists write fiction to create order out of chaos. When you shape a fictional story, you can tie every loose end, fit the round pegs comfortably in circular holes. In a novel the author can create a world that makes sense.

I think there are a lot of really positive aspects to social media for novelists. Even though our work is pretty solitary, through Twitter and Tumblr and Facebook and Instagram and blogging in general, we're better able to connect directly with readers.

I don't get on with novelists, don't enjoy their company. Once you've worked for a publisher, you understand the species, see them in their natural habitat, and it's not always pretty.