Novelist Quotes
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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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Sometimes I wonder why I'm a novelist right now. There is no definite career reason why I became a writer. Something happened, and I became a writer. And now I'm a successful writer.
Haruki Murakami
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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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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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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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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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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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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
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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