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.
Marge Piercy
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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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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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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'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 wrote a novel, so now they can call me a novelist. I tell stories; that's it.
Nathan Englander
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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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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 think I've made a commitment to being a political novelist, which in some ways isn't fashionable.
Nicholas Blincoe
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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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At any rate, that’s how I started running. Thirty three—that’s how old I was then. Still young enough, though no longer a young man. The age that Jesus Christ died. The age that Scott Fitzgerald started to go downhill. That age may be a kind of crossroads in life. That was the age when I began my life as a runner, and it was my belated, but real, starting point as a novelist.
Haruki Murakami
