Quotes About Novelist

The novelist is the vestigial bone on the body cinema. We're like the little toe that can be cut off.

I'm mostly a novelist these days, but I have written short stories in Fantasy, Science Fiction and horror.

Being a novelist meant she always anticipated the worst. It was her job to always think of dramatic things involving kidnaps and falling down mine-shafts and so on.

I think, if you want to grow a novelist, for that person to have a lot of boring time trying to entertain themselves is very important.

I am the luckiest novelist in the world. I was a first-time novelist who wasn't awash in rejection slips, whose manuscript didn't disappear in slush piles. I have had a wonderful time.

I think I'm someone who can prattle on a long time about something, which serves me well as a novelist, but it's the enemy when I'm writing short stories.

Unlike the poet, the novelist (see Auden's lustrous sonnet of that name) assumes that his or her reactions to the main events (in life, in history) are utterly median, average—predictably and dependably human.

The art lies in setting the inner life into the most violent motion with the smallest possible expenditure of outer life; for it is the inner life which is the real object of our interest - The task of the novelist is not to narrate great events but to make small ones interesting.

The task of the novelist is not to narrate great events but to make small ones interesting.

The new boyfriend) knows I write every day for hours but has no idea that all I'm writing about is me. It seems wiser to let him think I'm an aspiring novelist instead of just an alcoholic with a year of sobriety who spends eight hours a day writing about the other 16.

I said it before and I'll say it again: books are dead, plays are dead, poems are dead: there's only movies. Music is still okay, because music is sound track. Ten, fifteen years ago, every arts student wanted to be a novelist or a playwright. I'd be amazed if you could find a single one now with such a dead-end ambition. They all want to make movies. Not write movies. You don't write movies. You make movies.

A good novelist does not lead his characters, he follows them. A good novelist does not create events, he watches them happen and then writes down what he sees.

he was after all, a novelist...and a novelist was simply a fellow who got paid to tell lies. The bigger the lies, the better the pay.

A good novelist does not lead his characters, he follows them. A good novelist does not create events, he watches them happen and then writes down what he sees. A good novelist realizes he is a secretary, not God.

My greatest fear is feeling like a professional novelist. Somebody who creates characters, who sits down and has pieces of paper taped to the wall - what's going to happen in this scene, or this act. What I like is for it to be a much more scary, sloppy reflection of who I am.

The novel is a hybrid genre and a large part of its charm arises from the alluvial nature of its materials. There is nothing that doesn't suit a novelist in action, when he's in the course of writing his novel.

The greatest writers of spy fiction have, in almost every case, worked in intelligence before turning to writing. W. Somerset Maugham, John Buchan, Ian Fleming, Graham Greene, John le Carré: all had experienced the world of espionage firsthand. For the task of the spy is not so very different from that of the novelist: to create an imaginary, credible world and then lure others into it by words and artifice.

The plan was born in the mind of a novelist and took shape through a most unlikely cast of characters: a brilliant barrister, a family of undertakers, a forensic pathologist, a gold prospector, an inventor, a submarine captain, a transvestite English spymaster, a rally driver, a pretty secretary, a credulous Nazi, and a grumpy admiral who loved fly-fishing.

John Masterman, an Oxford history don, part-time detective novelist, and sportsman, was appointed chairman of the Twenty Committee, which included directors of intelligence for the army, navy, and RAF and representatives of MI5, MI6, Home Forces, and Home Defence.

Britain proves to be an ideal setting for many a medieval-minded crime novelist, regardless of century.

Perhaps a novelist has a greater ability to forget than other men--he has to forget or become sterile. What he forgets is the compost of the imagination.

So much of a novelist's writing … takes place in the unconscious: in those depths the last word is written before the word appears on paper. We remember the details of our story, we do not invent them.

The beginning of a book holds more apprehensions for the novelist than the ending. After living with a book for a year or two, he has come to terms with his unconsciousness — the end will be imposed. But if a book is started in the wrong way, it may never be finished.

Redwing had read somewhere that one of his favourite writers, Ernest Hemingway, had been asked what was the best training for a novelist. He had said "an unhappy childhood." Redwing had enjoyed a fine time growing up, but he wondered if this whole expedition was unfolding more like a novel, and would be blamed on one person, one character, the guy in charge: him. Maybe you got a happy childhood and then an unhappy adulthood, and that's how novels worked.