Novelist Quotes
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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.
George Bernard Shaw
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A novelist is someone who sits around the house all day in his underwear, trying not to smoke.
Scott Spencer
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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.
Jane Austen
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The business of the novelist is not to relate great events, but to make small ones interesting.
Arthur Schopenhauer
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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.
Brad Leithauser
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Proust was the greatest novelist of the twentieth century, just as Tolstoy was in the nineteenth.
Marcel Proust
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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.
Thomas Hardy
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I'm mostly a novelist these days, but I have written short stories in Fantasy, Science Fiction and horror.
Sarah Zettel
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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.
Rebecca Makkai
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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.
Nicola Griffith
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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.
Dale Peck
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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.
Alberto Moravia
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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.
John Ruskin
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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.
Ethan Canin
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I think I've made a commitment to being a political novelist, which in some ways isn't fashionable.
Nicholas Blincoe
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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."
Eliza Griswold
