Quotes About Novelist

If I die, I know the news item would be, 'Partner of Ricky Gervais and novelist dies.' That would come first. But I've come to terms with it. As long as they do still add the 'and novelist,' that will be fine.

The novelist now usurps the chair of the educator, the pulpit of the preacher, the columns of the journalist. Yet his original purpose of entertaining may have been his highest purpose. (introduction to Gladiator, Book League Monthly, 1930)

Although some people think I am a romantic novelist I have always thought of myself as a rather gritty radical historian.

If a novelist has created vivid characters, interesting relationships, settings the reader can easily imagine, and intriguing stories, a screenwriter has loads to work with. The challenge comes with deciding what to cut and what to keep.

Mr. Franzen said he and Mr. Wallace, over years of letters and conversations about the ethical role of the novelist, had come to the joint conclusion that the purpose of writing fiction was "a way out of loneliness." (NY Times article on the memorial service of David Foster Wallace.)

Leila would have been well advised, before marrying a novelist or imagining herself as one, to wait and sample life in a house where a big book was being contemplated.

People lose it when I say this, but I'm a novelist who doesn't read novels. There are lots of good reasons for not reading novels! I'm also a game writer who doesn't play games - I keep everything very separate. The only crossover with me is comics. I write them, and I read them passionately.

I enjoy journalism; anybody does. You see the results immediately; you've got an immediate audience instead of having to wait for your audience as you do if you're writing a book, and you get a bit of money coming in, and you can see more clearly how you're paying the bills. But it's not a good position for the serious novelist to be in.

A good novelist pays attention to his characters. A good biographer pays attention to the documents before her. A good critic pays close attention to the thing she's brought to evaluate.

I like to think of myself as an unmediated novelist - or perhaps a national novelist.

The novelist has permission to do whatever she chooses to supercharge whatever's interesting in her story. This is also known as freedom.

A novelist should not be too intelligent either, although... he may be permitted to be an intellectual.

For a spy novelist like me, the Edward J. Snowden story has everything. A man driven by ego and idealism - can anyone ever distinguish the two? - leaves his job and his beautiful girlfriend behind. He must tell the world the Panopticon has arrived. His masters vow to punish him, and he heads for Moscow in a desperate search for refuge.

As a novelist, there are three phone calls you never expect to receive in your lifetime because if you waited for them you would grow despairing - one calling from Stockholm with a Swedish accent, one from the NBA, and one from Oprah Winfrey.

As a novelist, you have to pick your battles. You are tired. You have begun to experience the first ominous tinglings of carpal tunnel syndrome. You wake up in the middle of the night with both hands lying across your chest like a couple of plucked bird carcasses, dead of all sensation.

Nothing, I find, has prepared me for the sight of my own characters walking about. A playwright or screenwriter must expect it; a novelist doesn't and naturally concludes that she has gone mad.

All my stories are cinematic. The Illustrated Man over at Warner Brothers a couple of years ago (1969) didn't work because they didn't read the short stories. I may be the most cinematic novelist in the country today. All of my short stories can be shot right off the page. Each paragraph is a shot.

Liberty of imagination should be the most precious possession of a novelist. To try voluntarily to discover the fettering dogmas of its own inspiration, is a trick worthy of humna perverseness which, after inventing an absurdity, endeavours to find for it a pedigree of distinguished ancestors...

In fact, though the books came slowly, he was a novelist to his bootlaces, an avid narrator who couldn't stop the story once it had started, who felt the terrors of existence so acutely that he had to tell them and tell them until he'd made them something else.

Perhaps, after all, the greatest psychologist is not the metaphysician but the novelist.

The daily life of the world is not dramatic—it is monotonous ; the novelist makes it dramatic by his silences, his suppressions, and his exaggerations.

In 1959, the scientist and novelist C. P. Snow gave a famous lecture, 'The Two Cultures', on the ever-growing and unhealthy divide he saw between science and the humanities.

Goldman laid low until the 1927 executions of anarchists and convicted bank robbers Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti stirred her back into action. With the support of admirers such as novelist Theodore Dreiser and philanthropist Peggy Guggenheim, Goldman began to write her memoirs as a way to reach the public in America. If she could not reach its shores, at least her words could.

The great spy novelist John Le Carré suggested this axiom: The cat sat on the mat is not the beginning of a story. The cat sat on the dog's mat, is.