Top 100 Novelists Quotes

Words matter. These are the best Novelists Quotes from famous people such as J. G. Ballard, Dorothy Fields, Haruki Murakami, William Golding, Pat Barker, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.

Novelists should be like scientists, dissecting the cad

Novelists should be like scientists, dissecting the cadaver.
J. G. Ballard
I do not think men have more talent. There are a great many women in the arts; novelists, painters, sculptors, poets-but the proportion is far lower in the field of song writing.
Dorothy Fields
For novelists or musicians, if they really want to create something, they need to go downstairs and find a passage to get into the second basement. What I want to do is go down there, but still stay sane.
Haruki Murakami
Novelists do not write as birds sing, by the push of nature. It is part of the job that there should be much routine and some daily stuff on the level of carpentry.
William Golding
That balance between involvement and detachment is what novelists do. It’s the ideal relationship between a novelist and a character, I think, total involvement and identity and empathy, stopping short of being autobiographical – in my case, anyway – but also quite detached.
Pat Barker
Some novelists are luckier than others in the eras of their formative intellectual years, but all Weltanschauungs return, which means that most novelists have at least a chance of a revival.
Jane Smiley
I have always loved short stories. I have been at least as influenced by the short story masters as I have been by novelists.
Daniel Woodrell
I think it’s also the case that I’m not as widely travelled, or as well-educated in history, as most of the other novelists I meet: so I have to write about my own country, at the present time, because it’s more or less all I know about!
Jonathan Coe
When I was young, I was a passionate reader of Sartre. I’ve read the American novelists, in particular the lost generation – Faulkner, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Dos Passos – especially Faulkner. Of the authors I read when I was young, he is one of the few who still means a lot to me.
Mario Vargas Llosa
I became fascinated by the fact that people write to give away rather than write to be read. It’s the difference between playwrights and novelists.
David Suchet
For a while, when I got out of college, I tried to write fiction. I’d grown up more around novelists, and my initial attraction was to write fiction. But I was much less suited for it. I always struggled to figure out what people were saying or doing in a particular moment.
David Grann
One of the admirable features of British novelists is that they have no scruple about setting their stories in foreign settings with wholly foreign personnel.
James Buchan
Even the best novelists are rarely congratulated on the quality of their observations about contemporary life.
Michelle Dean
A few of the world’s most famous non-American novelists have large followings in the United States, among them Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Guenter Grass, who were both popular even before winning the Nobel.
Stephen Kinzer
Love of place is one of the characteristics I enjoy most about novelists.
Melvyn Bragg
I’m a very good storyteller; I have a lot of compassion for people. That’s very useful for a novelist. A lot of novelists are snots. They’re just mean people. I’m not a terribly skilled stylist, nor do I want to be. I want a lot of people to read one of my stories and go, ‘That was pretty cool.’
James Patterson
Crime novelists do really well with Los Angeles.
Janet Fitch
Literary novelists who have a strong handle on plot are often characterized as good vacation reads because they manage to transport you elsewhere, away from the petty facts of ordinary life.
Michelle Dean
Let the novelists fret about consistency – story writers should feel free to jam; to get things right in new, surprising ways by allowing themselves, now and then, to get things wrong.
Walter Kirn
It may be time for serious literary novelists to take back some of the subject matter we abandoned to hack novelists and the movies.
Scott Spencer
I wrote my first novel in the same conditions as most first novelists – I had a full-time job, I shared an apartment, I had no time – and so I became a compulsive outliner of everything. Ever since then, my process has consisted of trying to forcibly rid myself of that compulsion.
Jonathan Dee
From Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos to Google and Facebook, many of America’s greatest entrepreneurs, musicians, movie directors and novelists are world beaters.
Gavin Esler
The fundamental difficulty that most novelists face when they are trying to adapt their own book into a screenplay is realizing that a screenplay is a completely different way of storytelling, and it has limitations.
Barry Eisler
Woman novelists seem to have a reputation for being dowdy.
Catherine Gaskin
Novelists are no more moral or certain than anybody else; we are ideologically adrift, and if we are any good then our writing will live in several places at once. That is both our curse and our charm.
Andrew O’Hagan
The truth is that I know very few novelists who have been satisfied with the adaptation of their books for the screen.
Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Novelists embody plural selves all the time. What are characters, after all, if not other selves?
Siri Hustvedt
It feels like when novelists say they find their characters are doing things they never thought they’d do, the material comes alive, and that’s how I feel making music.
Max Richter
That’s the most terrible thing about being an author – standing there at your mother’s funeral, but you don’t switch the author off. So your own innermost thoughts are grist for the mill. Who was it said – one of the famous lady novelists – ‘unhappy is the family that contains an author’?
Terry Pratchett
The British and American literary worlds operate in an odd kind of symbiosis: our critics think our contemporary novelists are not the stuff of greatness whereas certain contemporary Americans indubitably are. Their critics often advance the exact opposite: British fiction is cool, American naff.
Will Self
I think more talented writers should get involved in the industry, yes, of course. But that doesn’t presuppose that those writers have to be novelists or screenwriters.
Richard K. Morgan
Novelists have always had complete freedom to pretty mu

Novelists have always had complete freedom to pretty much tell their story any way they saw fit. And that’s what I’m trying to do.
Quentin Tarantino
Writing for the theatre is so different to writing for anything else. Because what you write is eventually going to be spoken. That’s why I think so many really powerful novelists can’t write a play – because they don’t understand that it’s spoken – that it hits the air. They don’t get that.
Sam Shepard
The forward march of American literature is usually chronicled by way of its male novelists. There is little sense, in that version of the story, that women writers of those eras were doing much worth remembering.
Michelle Dean
Novelists are in the business of constructing consciousness out of words, and that’s what we all do, cradle to grave. The self is a story we tell.
James Gleick
I think, in common with a lot of novelists, I wasn’t the most athletic guy at school.
Chris Cleave
Some novelists want to give people in history a voice because they have been denied it in the past.
Antony Beevor
Most novelists I know went through a period of intense self-examination and self-loathing after the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center. I certainly did.
Jay McInerney
Novelists don’t age as quickly as philosophers, who often face professional senility in their late twenties.
Martin Amis
Novelists should be free to write whatever they want, to let their imaginations roam as close to or as removed from reality as they see fit.
Sarah Weinman
Everyone assumes that novelists are smarter and more interesting. They’re generally smarter and more interesting, but they’re often very short. So it kind of cancels all the smart and interesting stuff out.
Liev Schreiber
For purposes of marketing, writers are designated as poets, novelists, or something else. But writing is about matchmaking, an attempt to marry sensations with apt words.
Teju Cole
America may have great poets and novelists, but she never will have more than one necromancer.
Rebecca Harding Davis
Do we value privacy in any real way? Thinking about blogs, Twitter, Facebook, MySpace… all these suggest we value exposure rather more. And instead of challenging this transformation, as they are supposed to – certainly at the more thoughtful edges of the art – novelists are buying into it wholesale.
Guy Gavriel Kay
Many of the novelists I admire never left their hometown. Look at Flannery O’Connor. So many of the great Russians never left Russia. Shakespeare never left England. The list goes on.
Jhumpa Lahiri
Actors love to do extreme things, so that is why they become actors; otherwise, they’d be novelists.
Zal Batmanglij
Real novelists, those we admire, those we consider timeless in their language and character and scene, those who receive accolades for inventive language and form, have writing lives we imagine in specific ways.
Susan Straight
I feel that historical novelists owe it to our readers to try to be as historically accurate as we can with the known facts. Obviously, we have to fill in the blanks. And then in the final analysis, we’re drawing upon our own imaginations. But I think that readers need to be able to trust an author.
Sharon Kay Penman
Novelists can ask – they can ask for anything – but their books are their answers in advance.
Joshua Cohen
When you get inside a literary novel you feel that the author, more often than not, just doesn’t know enough about things. They haven’t been around enough – novelists never go anywhere. Once I discovered true books about real things – books like ‘How To Run a Company’ – I stopped reading novels.
Peter York
I think there are a lot of really positive aspects to social media for novelists. Even though our work is pretty solitary, through Twitter and Tumblr and Facebook and Instagram and blogging in general, we’re better able to connect directly with readers.
Holly Black