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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The business of the novelist is not to relate great events, but to make small ones interesting.
Arthur Schopenhauer
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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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Proust was the greatest novelist of the twentieth century, just as Tolstoy was in the nineteenth.
Marcel Proust
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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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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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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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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 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.
Ben Richards
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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.
Richard Powers
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I wrote a novel, so now they can call me a novelist. I tell stories; that's it.
Nathan Englander
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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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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.
Alan Edwin Petty
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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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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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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.
Edward Sorel
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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
