Quotes About Novelist

I'd like to be remembered as someone who used their ability as a novelist or as a dramatist to say the things he felt needed to be said about the society while being as entertaining as possible. Because if you don't entertain, nobody's listening.

I'd rather entrust my daughters to Casanova than my secrets to a novelist. Literary fires are hotter even than sexual ones. And literary oaths are even strawier than the matrimonial or monastic varieties.

How can a novelist achieve atonement when with her absolute power of deciding outcomes, she is also god?

I was going to be a great woman novelist. Then the war came along and I think it's hard for young people today, don't you, to realize that when World War II happened we were dying to go and help our country.

Only a great genius like the Victorian novelist Elizabeth Gaskell can be mother, wife and novelist without solitude. I couldn't write until my youngest child went to school, and then I began - the first morning - and I've never stopped.

If the memoirist is borrowing narrative techniques from fiction, shouldn't the novelist borrow a few tricks from successful non-fiction?

A good TV writer needs all the same tricks a good novelist has.

I use these senses - touch, sight, feel and smell - as triggers that invite readers or propel them into the scene. The trick is not to make it obvious. I've written an entire chapter about this in my book, 'The Successful Novelist.' I've lectured about it extensively, but have yet to see many people pick up on it.

If I truly had the courage of my convictions, I would be a full-blown comic novelist.

The contemporary American novelist benefits in a way from being ignored. It makes you angrier and makes you want to go into all of those places where you shouldnt.

So we'll leave him [Plato] to the philosophers and not try to make a novelist of him against his will; he excluded innovative artists from his ideal republic, so we'll exclude him from our republic of fiction.

I've been a software engineer, a novelist, a journalist, and a manager - and managing developers is easily the trickiest thing I've ever done.

If you don't trust a novelist, who are you going to trust?

Do you want a piece of advice?' he asked. 'Please.' 'It's practical advice I give all budding writers when they ask me what they should do. If you want to be a writer, write. If you have a story to tell, tell it. Or try.' 'If to become a writer all one needed was a story to tell, everyone would become a novelist.' 'Imagine how awful, a world full of novelists,' joked Rosiers. 'The end of all times.' 'Probably the last thing the world needs is one more.' 'Let the world decide that.

The business of the poet and the novelist is to show the sorriness underlying the grandest things and the grandeur underlying the sorriest things.

I stole the character straight out of Georgette's A Civil Contract." Jenny considered herself on a first name basis with the late, legendary Regency novelist Georgette Heyer.

Isn't it exhausting, one could ask, this emotionally wrought involvement with so many sources, so many intimacies? For most of us it would be. But it is this novelist's heart, this writer's strange and insatiable passion for observation, for describing in all of its spectacular complexity the bewildering and plentiful world, that raises this brilliant and unruly book from its time, and makes it a classic of cultural journalism.

People have obsessions and fears and passions which they don't admit to. I think every character is interesting and has extremes. It's the novelist privilege to see how odd everyone is.

A novelist, poet and playwright who writes equally well in Shona and English, Charles Mungoshi is Zimbabwe's finest and most versatile writer. His life project has been to interrogate the notion of family.

More people thought I was strange because I was a teenage novelist, not because I was from Oklahoma. That's where I got the looks like I was from the zoo.

I was always at heart a novelist and wanted to tell a bigger story, so I wanted to create people who told other kinds of truths than literal truths.

There ought to be more grants that go to people in their late twenties and early thirties. That's a crucial age, although it's very hard to judge who is worth supporting and who is not. Looking back on my own life, I see that was the period when I was closest to giving up as a novelist and when I most needed some encouragement.

If you are a novelist of a certain type of termperament, then what you really want to do is re-invent the world. God wasn't too bad a novelist except he was a Realist.

The biggest book for me, when I was fifteen, was Crime and Punishment, which I read in a kind of fever. When I put it down, I thought, if this is what novels are then I want to be a novelist.