Quotes About Novelist

There never was a good biography of a good novelist. There couldn't be. He is too many people, if he's any good.

I read not so long ago about the construction of a large telescope in Chile's Atacama Desert, where rainfall can average a millimetre a year and the air is fifty times as dry as the air in Death Valley. Needless to say, skies over the Atacama are pristine. The pilgrim astronomer ventures to the earth's ravaged reaches in order to peer more keenly at other worlds, and I suppose the novelist is up to something similar.

Amazon was a family affair in another way. MacKenzie, an aspiring novelist,

José] Saramago for the last 25 years stood his own with any novelist of the Western world [..] He was the equal of Philip Roth, Gunther Grass, Thomas Pynchon and Don DeLillo. His genius was remarkably versatile — he was at once a great comic and a writer of shocking earnestness and grim poignancy. It is hard to believe he will not survive.

At any rate, that's how I started running. Thirty three—that's how old I was then. Still young enough, though no longer a young man. The age that Jesus Christ died. The age that Scott Fitzgerald started to go downhill. That age may be a kind of crossroads in life. That was the age when I began my life as a runner, and it was my belated, but real, starting point as a novelist.

Give me time, I thought, and I can turn out something much better. This may sound arrogant for someone who not long before had never given a thought to writing a novel. It even sounds arrogant to me. In all honesty, though, anyone who lacks that level of arrogance is unlikely to become a novelist.

No matter how much enthusiasm and effort you put into writing, if you totally lack literary talent you can forget about being a novelist.

I don't think I knew that you could be a novelist. I think a lot of my students are in the same condition. I thought it was unreachable, that it was sort of dead people. It took me a long time - I think I was well into novel writing before I really thought, 'Actually, this is a valid pastime.'

I am not an academic who happens to have written a novel. I am a novelist who happens to be quite good academically.

So, how to stay inside the world of entertainment without actually getting another job? I felt the only logical answer was to become a novelist. So I wrote the first book - driven by some very real feelings of desperation - and it worked.

Yeah, I have the detail-obsessed, controlling personality of a novelist, but I somehow ended up writing plays.

As a novelist, I feel lucky that I can traffic in nuance. I'm more interested in looking at how things change over time, at how people try and sometimes fail to make meaning out of their lives.

I am a novelist. I traffic in subtleties, and my goal in writing a novel is to leave the reader not knowing what to think. A good novel shouldn't have a point.

The novelist's intuition for the sacred differs from the translator's interrogation of the sacred.

A filmmaker has almost the same freedom as a novelist has when he buys himself some paper.

The essence of a novelist is to invent things and speak the truth, at the same time.

...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.

To tell you the truth. I am a wild and passionate novelist. I am therefore easily given over to telling wild and passionate lies.

As a historical novelist, there is very little I like more than spending time sorting through boxes of old letters, diaries, maps, trinkets, and baubles.

Sammy dreamed the usual Brooklyn dreams of flight and transformation and escape. He dreamed with fierce contrivance, transmuting himself into a major American novelist, or a famous smart person, like Clifton Fadiman, or perhaps into a heroic doctor; or developing, through practice and sheer force of will, the mental powers that would give him a preternatural control over the hearts and minds of men.

For a novelist, a given historic situation is an anthropologic laboratory in which he explores his basic question: What is human existence?

A novelist's characters must be with him as he lies down to sleep, and as he wakes from his dreams. He must learn to hate them and to love them.

I think it's restrictive to typecast myself as a novelist because I enjoy other forms of expression. I love literature and I love cinema.

But 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. (What do they need so many umbrellas for? Don't they realise that they are imaginary?)