Quotes About Novelist

I have that special sort of novelist body of knowledge which is extraordinarily wide and very, very shallow. So I can usually answer the questions on 'Jeopardy,' but never the bonus question.

I think a novelist must be more tender with living or 'real' people. The moral imperative of having been entrusted with their story looms before you every day, in every sentence.

The common wisdom is that only about 1 percent of a novelist's research ends up in his or her book. In my experience, it's even less - closer to a tenth of a percent.

I was a novelist first. But in the mid-'80s, I did work in television for ten years. And yes, that was frequently the reaction to my scripts. People would say, 'You know, George, this is great. We love it, a terrific script, but it would cost five times our budget to shoot this.'

Whether your mother is a novelist like mine or a third-generation military wife, the idea of a son or daughter being in mortal danger is terrifying.

The great novelist vibrated between two decanters with the regularity of a pendulum.

en el oficio de novelista hay algo aún mucho más importante que ese tintineo de palabras, y es la imaginación, las ensoñaciones, esas otras vidas fantásticas y ocultas que todos tenemos.

I'm a novelist," Ruth said. "I can't help it. My narrative preferences are all I've got.

Writing tends to be very deliberate. A novelist could probably run a military campaign with some success. They could certainly run a country.

Really, the novelist has the best casting since he doesn't have to cope with the actors and all the rest. -Alfred Hitchcock

Alas he had forgotten, he said, that she was a novelist as well as a mathematician. What a disappointment for the Parisian that he was neither. Merely a scholar, and a man.

His mental image of the artist was the novelist, who writes into being a world where everything, from a finger to the cosmos, is expressed as part of an unfolding of consciousness.

A novelist has a specific poetic license which also applies to his own life.

A novelist has mad a fictional representation of life. I doing so, he has revealed to us more significance, it may be, than he could find in life itself.

No English novelist is as great as Tolstoy –that is to say, has given so complete a picture of man's life, both on its domestic and heroic side. No English novelist has explored man's soul as deeply as Dostoyevsky. And no novelist anywhere has analysed the modern consciousness as successfully as Marcel Proust.

The novelist defines the story with the following example: If you are told that the king died and then the queen died, that is a sequence of events. If you were told that the king died and then the queen died of grief, that is a story that he was interested.

To travel in a foreign country is but to touch its surface. Under the guidance of a novelist of genius we penetrate to the secrets of a nation, and talk the very language of its citizens.

Sigmund Freud was a novelist with a scientific background. He just didn't know he was a novelist. All those damn psychiatrists after him, they didn't know he was a novelist either.

I started out as a novelist and wrote several novels before deciding to publish one, and I fully intend to go back to the form.

I was directed because I knew I wanted to be a novelist, but I didn't have a very good job or a way of getting published. I found those years to be among the most difficult of my life.

I hadn't meant to do the pattern of publishing short stories and then a novel. I thought, 'I'm a novelist. I know it.' But you have to kind of write a lot of bad novels before you can write a good one, I think, so I did that. But meanwhile, I loved the short stories I did.

I don't really consider myself a novelist, it just came out purely by accident.

Research is the historical novelist's map, constraint, and purest energy.

Every novelist has a different purpose - and often several purposes which might even be contradictory.