I think that’s the most important job of a novelist – to bring authority to their writing.
I love the novelist’s freedom of going into different people’s subjectivity and being able to work with them as characters.
What description of clouds and sunsets was to the old novelist, description of scientific apparatus and methods is to the modern Scientific Detective writer.
If you’re a novelist, as I am in real life, you’re usually so desperate for any kind of feedback.
In order for a long piece of work to engage a novelist over an extended period of time, it has to deal with questions that you find very important, that you’re trying to work out.
To be true to life, a novel must have an ending that is inevitable given the specific personalities of the characters involved. The novelist must not impose an ending upon them.
More people thought I was strange because I was a teenage novelist, not because I was from Oklahoma. That’s where I got the looks like I was from the zoo.
It’s impossible for me to disentangle how much of my storytelling urge is the product of growing up with novelist parents and how much is a genetic legacy from those same parents.
Yes, but also one of the problems for a novelist in Ireland is the fact that there are no formal manners. I mean some people have beautiful manners but there’s no kind of agreed form of manners.
The great thing about being a novelist is that you organize your own day.
I started out as a novelist and wrote several novels before deciding to publish one, and I fully intend to go back to the form.
It’s too easy to unconsciously echo another novelist’s voice while reading fiction, a habit of mimicry I probably picked up as a musician.
I use these senses – touch, sight, feel and smell – as triggers that invite readers or propel them into the scene. The trick is not to make it obvious. I’ve written an entire chapter about this in my book, ‘The Successful Novelist.’ I’ve lectured about it extensively, but have yet to see many people pick up on it.
If a novelist had concocted a villain like Trump – a larger-than-life, over-the-top avatar of narcissism, mendacity, ignorance, prejudice, boorishness, demagoguery, and tyrannical impulses, she or he would likely be accused of extreme contrivance and implausibility.
Traditional autobiography has generally had a poor press. The novelist Daphne du Maurier condemned all examples of this literary form as self-indulgent. Others have quipped that autobiography reveals nothing bad about its writer except his memory.
Paul Lisicky, in his new memoir, ‘The Narrow Door,’ describes losing his old friend, the novelist Denise Gess, and his husband, the acclaimed poet and memoirist Mark Doty, within a year of each other: Gess to cancer, at the age of 57, and Doty to another man.
Every thought and word that a novelist thinks or writes is part of that castle constructed from sands on the beach of Me, including the turret or rampart or moat he may have thought or written on behalf of someone or something else.
I’m a middle-class, middle-brow novelist. And that’s it. It amuses me.
I became a novelist because of ‘Gone With the Wind,’ or more precisely, my mother raised me up to be a ‘Southern’ novelist, with a strong emphasis on the word ‘Southern’ because ‘Gone With the Wind’ set my mother’s imagination ablaze when she was a young girl growing up in Atlanta.
No poet or novelist wishes he were the only one who ever lived, but most of them wish they were the only one alive, and quite a number fondly believe their wish has been granted.
The art of the novelist is not unrelated to the illness of multiple personality disorder. It’s a much milder form. But the better the book, the nearer to the padded cell you are.
I stopped performing because I don’t have the temperament of a performer. You have to want to do the same thing over and over again. Once I got it right, I didn’t want to do it again. I always use the analogy of a novelist who has to read his novel in public night after night. I just didn’t want to do it.
When I was a child, I loved making stories, so I thought maybe I would be a novelist.
I wanted to be a novelist for so long.
Even when I was living below the poverty line as a novelist, I was still living better than 99.5% of the human population of the world. But in my little, soft realm of trying to amuse a few dozen middle-class people with my books and articles, I did struggle to survive in my own way.
I become a first-time novelist and a senior citizen on the same day.
If I die, I know the news item would be, ‘Partner of Ricky Gervais and novelist dies.’ That would come first. But I’ve come to terms with it. As long as they do still add the ‘and novelist,’ that will be fine.
The novel, for me, was an accident. I really don’t consider myself a novelist.
Like so many others, I came to romance during the golden age of it – Judith McNaught, Julie Garwood, Johanna Lindsey and Jude Deveraux were at the height of their historical domination. Without those women, I wouldn’t be a romance novelist.
A novelist’s sense that he or she is ‘above’ a certain genre mainly comes out of the notion that the genre is somehow a debased version of his or her preferred form.
I’m a novelist, that’s how I make my livelihood, and I concentrate on the novels.
Faulkner was the first novelist I read with pen and paper in hand because his technique stunned me.
I had thought of writing, actually, and that later on I’d be a novelist.
I’d defend the right for any novelist to experiment with form or language, but if people don’t take to it, don’t react by making out that they are thick.
The reason I write is because I have questions. What I don’t want is for people to forget that I’m a novelist and think I’m a sociologist or something. I don’t want to feel trapped into a corner where I don’t belong.
Research is the historical novelist’s map, constraint, and purest energy.
Sigmund Freud was a novelist with a scientific background. He just didn’t know he was a novelist. All those damn psychiatrists after him, they didn’t know he was a novelist either.
Yeah, I have the detail-obsessed, controlling personality of a novelist, but I somehow ended up writing plays.
Both the historian and the novelist view history as the struggle of a tiny minority, able and determined to make judgments, which is up against a vast and densely packed majority of the blind, who are led by their instincts and unable to think for themselves.
I’ve always liked the idea that writing is a form of travel. And I started my writing career as a mystery novelist for adults.
I am not a political thinker. I’m not even much of a thinker. I’m a hack novelist.
I used to describe myself as a comic novelist, but my concerns seem to have darkened over the past few years.
The contemporary American novelist benefits in a way from being ignored. It makes you angrier and makes you want to go into all of those places where you shouldn’t.
With the marketing pressures driving the book world today, it’s much easier to get the author of a memoir on a television show than a serious novelist.
I read all of Rider Haggard’s books. For me he had the romance of Africa with a little bit of mysticism. I’m delighted to be looked on as his heir and be categorised as an adventure novelist because that’s exactly what I am.
He was interviewed in the early ’60s by a young novelist, Pati Hill.
You say that you hope I will be recognized as the best novelist of my generation. I want you to know now and know completely that that would mean to me absolutely nothing.
Only a great genius like the Victorian novelist Elizabeth Gaskell can be mother, wife and novelist without solitude. I couldn’t write until my youngest child went to school, and then I began – the first morning – and I’ve never stopped.
I couldn’t have been the novelist I was without being the journalist I was.
I’m a novelist, editor, short story writer. I also teach, and I freelance sometimes as an arts consultant. Most of my books have been published by Warner Books, now known as Grand Central Books.
I put it to you that there are no British poets, there are no British novelists. I have heard myself described as one, but I think really I’m an English novelist; there are Scottish poets and Scottish novelists.
Playing with different genres and perspectives and ways of telling stories is one of the perks of being a novelist, but at the same time, I want precision. And in order to be precise about stuff, you have to get personal. Symbolism is very boring.
All my siblings became artists. One’s a novelist, my brother is a painter, my sister was a costume designer.
Science fiction is a literary field crowded with strong opinions, and no SF novelist delivered himself more memorably of his views – on politics, sexuality, religion, and many other contentious topics – than Robert Heinlein.
Every ‘Observer’ writer wants to be a novelist.
A Christian novelist tries to describe the world as it is.
I’m a novelist, so I can’t write about ideas unless they’re attached to people.
Things that appear on the front page of the newspaper as ‘fact’ are far more dangerous than the games played by a novelist, and can lead to wars.
Former Dublin newsman Paul Lynch made his debut as a novelist a few years ago with a book called ‘Red Sky in Morning,’ set in mid-19th century County Donegal, where a rage-driven farmer has committed a murder with devastating results.
