Quotes About Novelist

You need three things to become a successful novelist: talent, luck and discipline. Discipline is the one element of those three things that you can control, and so that is the one that you have to focus on controlling, and you just have to hope and trust in the other two.

When Communism has been realized, everyone will be a novelist.

The true novelist is one who understands the work as a continuous poem, is a myth-maker, and the wonder of the art resides in the endless different ways of telling a story.

For me, as a beginning novelist, all other living writers form a control group for whom the world is a placebo.

Let us lament less the obscenity of today's novelist than his misfortune. When man becomes insignificant, copulation and defecation become important actions.

If a person is not talented enough to be a novelist, not smart enough to be a lawyer, and his hands are too shaky to perform operations, he becomes a journalist.

Society, like most fashionable dames, is fond of selfdelusion, and is very apt to break in shivers the mirror that reflects her decolletee too faithfully. Now, the novelist is a painter who draws his portrait on canvas which a stone or two of censure will not break; but the playwright's fragile glass falls to atoms unless braced in a gilded frame of popularity. Critical hostility is often the breath of life to the writer; but to the actor it is absolute damnation

Ultimately, how far away exactly does a novelist remain? At the margins of life in order to describe it, because if you are immersed in it – in the action – the image you have of it is mixed up.

Novels are fictions and therefore they tell lies, but through those lies every novelist attempts to tell the truth about the world.

Mark Twain was a great traveler and he wrote three or four great travel books. I wouldn't say that I'm a travel novelist but rather a novelist who travels - and who uses travel as a background for finding stories of places.