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'm mostly a novelist these days, but I have written short stories in Fantasy, Science Fiction and horror.
Sarah Zettel
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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 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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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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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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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.
Richard Paul Evans
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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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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
