Even if there is endless documentation, it would be impossible to know what a man thought inside his own mind… This is where the novelist’s creative imagination has to take over.
Every novelist has a different purpose – and often several purposes which might even be contradictory.
If the novelist shares his or her problems with the characters, he or she is able to study his personal unconscious.
I have that special sort of novelist body of knowledge which is extraordinarily wide and very, very shallow. So I can usually answer the questions on ‘Jeopardy,’ but never the bonus question.
I always wanted to be a writer, and I did want to be a novelist. In college I took a couple of classes that taught me I would never be a novelist. I discovered I had no imagination. My short stories were always thinly veiled memoir.
Without a doubt, I was born to want to make cinema, but the kind of cinema I want to make is not like commercial movies, which I enjoy myself, but I wanted to be the kind of filmmaker who wrote original work, sort of like a novelist would who deals with who we are and our times or our relationships.
Miss Austen had shown the infinite possibilities of ordinary and present things for the novelist.
Among the many problems which beset the novelist, not the least weighty is the choice of the moment at which to begin his novel.
A novelist needs to know his own strong points and weak points.
It’s like a novelist writing far out things. If it makes a point and makes sense, then people like to read that. But if it’s off in left field and goes over the edge, you lose it. The same with musical talent, I think.
I never wanted to be a Cold War novelist.
Before I became a suspense novelist, I wrote romantic suspense as Alicia Scott.
As a novelist, you have to be free. Books can’t be an act of filial duty.
I wrote a novel, so now they can call me a novelist. I tell stories; that’s it.
A novelist can never be his own reader, except when he is ridding his manuscript of syntax errors, repetitions, or the occasional superfluous paragraph.
And I didn’t grow up wanting to be a director. I grew up wanting to be a writer, so for me, that was always the goal – to be a novelist, not a screenwriter. And I think, again, if I didn’t have the novels, maybe I’d be much more frustrated by not having directed yet.
I studied the short story as part of my creative writing course at university but then set off as a novelist. Generally, there is a sense that even if you want to write short stories, you need to do a novel first.
No one looks at a baby and says, ‘You are going to be a great novelist, and you really need to start writing now.’ Something in us says: ‘This is what I must do.’
As a novelist, I feel lucky that I can traffic in nuance. I’m more interested in looking at how things change over time, at how people try and sometimes fail to make meaning out of their lives.
I knew I’d always be a second-rate academic, and I thought, ‘Well, I’d rather be a second-rate novelist or even a third-rate one’.
In 2013, when it turned out that the plot of LaBeouf’s short film ‘HowardCantour.com’ (2012) had been purloined from graphic novelist Daniel Clowes’s 2007 comic ‘Justin M. Damiano’, the actor-director responded with a series of tweet apologies that also appeared to be shoplifted.
Novelist and poet David Huddle is a quiet but fabulous writer, and he does adolescent longing better than anyone I know.
It’s hard for me to believe that a shy, bespectacled college graduate like Brad Meltzer who’s a novelist and a father is a really setting out to be weirdly misogynistic.
Irish novelist John Banville has a creepy, introverted imagination.
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.
I was going to be the best failed novelist in Paris. That was certainly not the worst thing in the world that one could be.
For a novelist, a given historic situation is an anthropologic laboratory in which he explores his basic question: What is human existence?
I’m not a twentieth-century novelist, I’m not modern, and certainly not postmodern. I follow the form of the nineteenth-century novel; that was the century that produced the models of the form. I’m old-fashioned, a storyteller. I’m not an analyst, and I’m not an intellectual.
I wasn’t taking myself seriously as a novelist, and then it became my day job.
The novelist wants to know how things will turn out; the historian already knows how things turned out, but wants to know why they turned out the way they did.
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.’
For a novelist, the great thing about the Stone Age people is that we know virtually nothing about their beliefs – which means that I get to make it up! But it’s still got to be plausible.
I have an English literature degree. I wanted to be the next great American novelist from a very early age, but I put it aside for a while, because I got very realistic at one point.
My goal as a novelist is to create smart entertainment, books that keep bright people up too late, that make them want to read just one more chapter. Books that have ideas threaded in amidst the thrilling bits, ideas that I hope linger even after people close the book.
After I convinced them that I was a harmless novelist, I actually got them to give me a tour of the harem – which is usually off limits for tourists.
I wanted to be a novelist from a very early age – 11 or 12 – but I don’t think I ever thought I would write historical fiction. I never thought I might write academic history because I simply wasn’t good enough!
The fact is that in this day and age I don’t think any novelist can assume that a book will get attention.
I think if I was interested in writing on my own, I would be a novelist – then you could write about yourself, and that would be it. You wouldn’t need anyone else.
I am a professional comedian, a published novelist, and a general wit for hire.
I became aesthetically obsessed with language. And ‘literary artist’ – poet and novelist – is a calling. You are called to it the way preachers are called to preaching the gospel.
‘Divergent,’ directed by Neil Burger, displayed an admirable seriousness and some grim verve in laying out the boundaries of novelist Veronica Roth’s dystopia – six segregated but ostensibly harmonious regions defined by their inhabitants’ skills.
The suspense of a novel is not only in the reader, but in the novelist, who is intensely curious about what will happen to the hero.
As a novelist, I suppose I can say that I’m highly articulate. But I know, as a person, in other ways, I’m not always articulate. I think we are all, from time to time, inarticulate, at some level, about some things.
You perhaps know me as a novelist. Literature is one of the arts – in fact, the noblest of the arts. That is not my opinion; it was first expressed by the ancients. As art, literature has many similarities with the other art forms.
You get spoiled as a novelist because you get to be the director and the editor, and you play all the parts, but as a screenwriter, you are a bit down the ladder.
I’m a great believer in the novelist being ‘on the scene,’ reporting, traveling, meeting all sorts of people.
The writer, the poet, the novelist, are all creators. This does not mean that they invent language; it means that they use language to create beauty, ideas, images. This is why we cannot do without them.
I think of myself now as a writer, although I wouldn’t go as far as to say ‘novelist’ because that sounds like a Victorian person.
The life of a bestselling novelist sounds like it ought to be spectacularly glamorous and fun, but in fact I spend most of my time incognito, and in fact were you to pass me in the street you would think I was just another dowdy suburban mom.
A house with any kind of age will have dozens of stories to tell. I suppose if a novelist could live long enough, one could base an entire oeuvre on the lives that weave in and out of an antique house.
The painter paints, the musician makes music, the novelist writes novels. But I believe that we all have some influence, not because of the fact that one is an artist, but because we are citizens.
I’ll be writing essays long after I’ve stopped writing fiction. There is this unusually broad range in the non-fiction, but if you look at what I’m capable of as a novelist, I’m more limited.
If I truly had the courage of my convictions, I would be a full-blown comic novelist.
Vidal was a novelist, an essayist, a playwright, a screenwriter, and many other things. Buckley started a magazine, hosted a TV show, lead a political movement, and was a master debater. They were multihyphenates in a way that you rarely see anymore.
I’m a novelist who read a lot as a kid. When you grow up on books and then grow up to write books, famous authors are a lot more meaningful to you than TV and movie stars.
