Novelist Quotes
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I'm probably the only novelist who has ever written about political fugitives who actually knew a lot about them, had contact with them, and had a realistic notion of how they survived.
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A pornographic novelist is one who exploits the sexual instinct as a prostitute does. A legitimate sex novel elucidates it or brings out its poetry, tragedy, or comedy.
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I'm a novelist at heart. My sole intention is to write the best novel possible. I don't think about the film potential at all.
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A novelist is someone who sits around the house all day in his underwear, trying not to smoke.
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I'm mostly a novelist these days, but I have written short stories in Fantasy, Science Fiction and horror.
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There seems almost a general wish of descrying the capacity and undervaluing the labour of the novelist, and of slighting the performances which have only genius, wit, and taste to recommend them.
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The business of the novelist is not to relate great events, but to make small ones interesting.
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I read not so long ago about the construction of a large telescope in Chile's Atacama Desert, where rainfall can average a millimetre a year and the air is fifty times as dry as the air in Death Valley. Needless to say, skies over the Atacama are pristine. The pilgrim astronomer ventures to the earth's ravaged reaches in order to peer more keenly at other worlds, and I suppose the novelist is up to something similar.
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Proust was the greatest novelist of the twentieth century, just as Tolstoy was in the nineteenth.
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The business of the poet and the novelist is to show the sorriness underlying the grandest things and the grandeur underlying the sorriest things.
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Novelist and poet David Huddle is a quiet but fabulous writer, and he does adolescent longing better than anyone I know.
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I love being convincing. I love when a gesture is convincing and I love doing research for a picture. If you're telling a story you need a background. Just like a novelist needs background information to make a story interesting, I think an artist needs it for a picture too.
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The only way to be a novelist, to think that you can create something others will give themselves up to for a dozen hours or more, is to have psychotic self-belief.
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Yes, one uses what one knows, but autobiography means something else. I should never be able to write a real autobiography; I always end by falsifying and fictionalizing—I’m a liar, in fact. That means I’m a novelist, after all. I write about what I know.
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I'm a novelist. I think fiction is important or I wouldn't be doing it, but most of it's bad.
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I think that if the novel's task is to describe where we find ourselves and how we live now, the novelist must take a good, hard look at the most central facts of contemporary life - technology and science.
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I wrote a novel, so now they can call me a novelist. I tell stories; that's it.
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I was a novelist before I was a TV screenwriter. Actually, as a kid, I think I'd always wanted to be a writer, but never thought that I would be one.
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I think I've made a commitment to being a political novelist, which in some ways isn't fashionable.
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The idea of being a novelist is really romantic, but it's kind of the same as being president of the United States - it's not gonna happen.
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Brings O'Brian's achievement to a new height....Such is O'Brian's power to possess the imagination that I found I was living in his world as much as my own, wanting to know what happens next. That is the real test. Any contemporary novelist should recognize in Patrick O'Brian a Master of the Art.
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We may, without offending any laws of good taste, require of an architect, as we do of a novelist, that he should be not only correct, but entertaining.
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I'm becoming more of a novelist as I get older. The novel just seems the truer form. There's less artifice involved.
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One of the things about landays is that they thrive in a modern context. Early on I went to this incredible Pashtun novelist, Mustafa Salik, who is a bestselling novelist in Afghanistan and works for the BBC in Pashto. With the question of the sanctity of the poems in mind, I asked him, "Aren't you worried? They've been posted on Facebook and such." And he said, "Just the opposite. This is a folk form; they survive and thrive as people share them."
