Quotes About Novelist

The most amazing gift about being a novelist is that you get to pursue your curiosity every day.

But the fellow talked like a cheap novelist. - Or like a very good novelist for the matter of that, if it's the business of a novelist to make you see things clearly.

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

I probably would have gone the M.F.A. route except I was a dad at 19, and it made more sense to go to work for a newspaper and support a kid that way. But the funny thing is, that detour became the most important step in my developing as a novelist.

The pull of history has been a strong theme in my life as a novelist.

The novelist is condemned to wander all his life. Homeless and blind like Oedipus he wanders until death. And so let us protect the novelist and adore him, with pity, honor, and love.

Passionate attraction to someone of the opposite sex will make a hero or a fool of a novelist each time.

Everywhere there are the politicians and the priest, the ayatollahs and the economists, who will try to explain that reality is what they say it is. Never trust them; trust only the novelist, those deep bankers who spend their time trying to turn pieces of printed paper into value, but never pretend that the result is anything more than a useful fiction.

For instance: if contemporary trends in architecture, even in this period of accelerating carbon emissions, favor shiny, glass-and-metal-plated towers, do we not have to ask, What are the patterns of desire that are fed by these gestures? If I, as a novelist, choose to use brand names as elements in the depiction of character, do I not need to ask myself about the degree to which this makes me complicit in the manipulations of the marketplace?

To capture the drama of the unconscious, one had to start with the key, and the key was the dream. But the novelist's task was to pursue this dream, to unravel its meaning; the goal was to reach the relation of dream to life; the suspense was in finding this which led to a deeper significance of our acts.

What god has enough free time to arrange this very special humiliation, to fly a minor novelist across the world so that he can feel, in some seventh sense, the minusculitude of his own worth?

The Russian novelist pulls his lush eyebrows together like the parts of a modular sofa.

our Minor American Novelist is making his way to a small gold-rush town in the Sierra Nevadas to give a lecture in their Significant Speakers series. For anyone else, it would be a mere three-hour journey, but our Arthur Less has to do things the hard way; he has chosen to take a ferry and a train.

Years away at sea, husbands coming back — if they came back — having seen things you cannot imagine, having wrestled with the unknown and, somehow, won? All this with barely enough money made to cover the debt accrued? I imagine it was like being married to a novelist.

I have remarked elsewhere that I regard the Almighty as not a bad novelist, except that He is a realist.

As a novelist you write about social mores, but not everything can be explained. You want to make the familiar strange and memorable again, and an easy shortcut is to make your protagonist young, clueless and innocent.

The things that interest me and the stories I want to write, their factual accuracy is not something I want to make a claim about. I don't want people to know what details are true and which ones aren't. I love the novelist's freedom of going into different people's subjectivity and being able to work with them as characters.

If I were called upon to state in a few words the essence of everything I was trying to say both as a novelist and as a preacher, it would be something like this: Listen to your life. See it for the fathomless mystery that it is. In the boredom and pain of it, no less than in the excitement and gladness: touch, taste, smell your way to the holy and hidden heart of it, because in the last analysis, all moments are key moments, and life itself is grace. —FREDERICK BUECHNER

Novelist and poet David Huddle is a quiet but fabulous writer, and he does adolescent longing better than anyone I know.

Being a novelist is hard for anyone - male or female. You don't get to quit your day job.

Although some people think I am a romantic novelist I have always thought of myself as a rather gritty radical historian.

Personally, I have never wished I were a male novelist.

I am a professional comedian, a published novelist, and a general wit for hire.

I'd defend the right for any novelist to experiment with form or language, but if people don't take to it, don't react by making out that they are thick.