Quotes About Novelist

Let me put it this way: I don't plan to retire. What would I do, become a brain surgeon? I mean, a brain surgeon can retire and write novels, but a novelist can't retire and do brain surgery - or at least he better not.

If the novelist isn't surprised by where his book ends up, he or she probably hasn't written anything worth remembering.

One of the big surprises for me about Einstein was... that he wasn't this big introvert; he was more like a novelist or a painter. It's amazing how close society came to not benefiting from Albert Einstein's genius.

The better you know someone, the less well you often see them (and the less well they can therefore be transferred into fiction). They may be so close as to be out of focus, and there is no operating novelist to dispel the blur.

Though always frank, the novelist was never wholly sincere.

As a successful romantic novelist - one of my publishers is Mills & Boon - I create the sort of male heroes that no woman could fail to adore and few real men could hope to emulate.

Not long ago, a novelist could believe he could have an effect on our consciousness of terror. Today, the men who shape and inflence human consciousness are the terrorists.

As a novelist, I tell stories and people give me money. Then financial planners tell me stories and I give them money.

I would never have been a novelist without working as a psychologist...it was a great education in human nature.

A novelist is essentially a person who covers distance through his patience, slowly, like an ant. A novelist impresses us not by his demonic and romantic vision, but by his patience.

I believe that only poetry counts ... A great novelist is first of all a great poet.

Felicia's Journey by the Irish short-story writer and novelist William Trevor.

Essential characteristic of the really great novelist: a Christ-like, all-embracing compassion.

Historian: an unsuccessful novelist.

A whim, a passing mood, readily induces the novelist to move hearth and home elsewhere. He can always plead work as an excuse to get him out of the clutches of bothersome hosts.

Art is for [the Irish] inseparable from artifice: of that, the theatre is the home. Possibly, it was England made me a novelist.

A novelist is, like all mortals, more fully at home on the surface of the present than in the ooze of the past.

The novelist must look on humanity without partiality or prejudice. His sympathy, like that of the historian, must be unbounded, and untainted by sect or party.

The materials of the novelist must be real; they must be gathered from the field of humanity by his actual observation.

Don't be a novelist --- be a statistician. Much more scope for the imagination.

I think of myself as a songwriter, a weaver of story and imagination in a way that a novelist might write a book.

I suppose I am a born novelist, for the things I imagine are more vital and vivid to me than the things I remember.

Speaking as a novelist myself, I know that members of our profession live in our imaginations as much or more as we inhabit what people call 'the real world.

V. S. Pritchett has a challenging aside in which he describes Jane Austen as a war novelist, pointing out that the facts of the long war are basic to all her books.