Historian: an unsuccessful novelist.
If a novelist tells you something she knows or thinks, and you believe her, that is not because either of you think she is God, but because she is doing her work – as a novelist.
Say what you will about Queen Eleanor, she was a savvy, quick-witted woman who made her mark on history. And as the founder of the Courts of Love, what better patron monarch could there be for a romantic novelist?
I’m mostly a novelist these days, but I have written short stories in Fantasy, Science Fiction and horror.
As a novelist, I’m incredibly lucky to make a living, but that doesn’t mean that I don’t lie awake at four o’clock in the morning, worrying.
The common wisdom is that only about 1 percent of a novelist’s research ends up in his or her book. In my experience, it’s even less – closer to a tenth of a percent.
As a novelist, I tell stories and people give me money. Then financial planners tell me stories and I give them money.
I was a painter, then a novelist, then a journalist, then a screenwriter, and now I’m a director, and it feels all part of the same continuum. One led to the other, and it just feels like the natural confluence of all the ways of storytelling that I’ve been doing for almost 30 years.
I started out as a novelist, and I think novels have gotten a little stiff, a little repetitive, and the energy in comics was much more appealing.
The essayist has to follow a certain intellectual pattern. The novelist has the advantage of using fantasy, of being subjective.
I’d be far too self-conscious and insecure if I suspected my editor might be a better novelist than I.
If a person is not talented enough to be a novelist, not smart enough to be a lawyer, and his hands are too shaky to perform operations, he becomes a journalist.
I think it’s restrictive to typecast myself as a novelist because I enjoy other forms of expression. I love literature and I love cinema.
I don’t think any novelist should be concerned with literature.
Uzodinma Iweala is a fine and confident novelist.
I wanted to write about the Korean War, but I had no entry into it that made the kind of sense it needs to make for a novelist.
I can’t promise that every child with learning differences will become a novelist, but I do think all children can become lifelong readers.
I stopped being an engaged journalist and became a disengaged novelist.
I’ve always wanted to be a novelist, so I just try to write really great narrative.
‘Floating Worlds,’ published in 1975 and the lone science fiction novel by acclaimed historical novelist Cecelia Holland, was unique in being completely devoid of the usual pulp influences present in much space opera up to that time.
It’s an imaginative thing we do; it’s about immersing oneself in one’s imagination. If you’re a novelist, you do it with pen and paper. We do it with our bodies.
I want Tom Clancy, the Maryland novelist, to write the story of the rest of my life.
As a novelist, I mined my history, my family and my memory, but in a very specific way. Writing fiction, I never made use of experiences immediately as they happened. I needed to let things fester in my memory, mature and transmogrify into something meaningful.
As a novelist, I remain interested in the notion of a single reckless act and its consequences.
I never thought I would become amazing. I never thought I would be as great as my father. I would like to continue writing novels, and hopefully, at some point, I would like to make the switch from being ‘Stephen Hawking’s daughter’ to ‘novelist Lucy Hawking,’ and that will be a fabulous day.
The novelist’s obligation to remake the sensuous texture of a vanished world is also the historian’s. The strongest fiction writers often do deep research to make the thought and utterances of lost time credible.
I get a lot of energy from making things up, which is why I feel I’m a novelist.
I am a fictionalizing philosopher, not a novelist.
One’s politics are part of one even when one is writing. But if I want to say anything about the state of civil society, I will write an essay. The responsibilities you feel as a novelist are literary ones, I think, not civic ones. And I think politicians are interesting to write about.
Why does any novelist keep writing long after they’ve made money? Because they’ve failed to write the perfect novel.
I thought I wanted to be a journalist or a novelist.
Mark Twain was a great traveler and he wrote three or four great travel books. I wouldn’t say that I’m a travel novelist but rather a novelist who travels – and who uses travel as a background for finding stories of places.
The historical novelist has to consider what has actually happened, while the SF writer is dealing in possibilities, but they are both in the business of imagining a world unlike our own and yet connected to it.
I wouldn’t sit down and work at writing a song like a novelist or something.
I don’t want to marry anybody, but I certainly wouldn’t want to marry a bad novelist.
I once did an event with Ian Rankin where he said he didn’t really need to do much background research because his books are set in the present, and I just thought: ‘You lucky, lucky beast!’ because as a historical novelist, I live constantly on the edge of wondering whether tissues had been invented.
The thing I love about being a novelist is that with each project, you invent a new world. You approach it with a different set of aesthetic and structural ideas, and you grapple with a different series of problems in figuring out how to tell the story. And yet there are certain concerns that stay constant.
In effect I am not a novelist, but rather a failed essayist who started to write novels because he didn’t know how to write essays.
If you are a novelist of a certain type of temperament, then what you really want to do is re-invent the world. God wasn’t too bad a novelist, except he was a Realist.
Political novels are full of pitfalls, particularly for a novelist with strong political leanings.
I guess I would say that most of what I’ve learned about storytelling derives from novels and short stories. I cannot think of a novel or story, or a novelist or story writer, who thinks in terms of three-act structure.
I think the hardest part of writing is revising. And by that I mean the following: A novelist has to create the piece of marble and then chip away to find the figure in it.
Freud was just a novelist.
With his compulsively slamming lyrics and king-of-the-world delivery, DMX intuitively echoes the existentialism of the projects of the novelist Donald Goines.
What is the difference between the novelist and the liar? At some moments, I have often wondered.
I’m becoming more of a novelist as I get older. The novel just seems the truer form. There’s less artifice involved.
Being a novelist and being a mother have exactly coincided in my life: the call from my agent saying that I had a contract for my first novel – that was on my answering phone message when I got back from the hospital with my first child.
As a novelist, where do you go to tap into memories, and impressions, and sensations? It’s usually, in my experience, your early life, before you started thinking of yourself as a writer, because somehow those experiences are unadulterated.
That’s the novelist’s job: to peel back the layers and look underneath.
I am not an academic who happens to have written a novel. I am a novelist who happens to be quite good academically.
The novelist has permission to do whatever she chooses to supercharge whatever’s interesting in her story. This is also known as freedom.
Happy is the novelist who manages to preserve an actual love letter that he received when he was young within a work of fiction, embedded in it like a clean bullet in flabby flesh and quite secure there, among spurious lives.
There’s a unique bond of trust between readers and authors that I don’t believe exists in any other art form; as a reader, I trust a novelist to give me his or her best effort, however flawed.
One of the writers I most admire is Hilary Mantel because in the middle of her career, she just changed paths entirely and became just a totally different novelist.
I felt like I haven’t had the typical experience of a novelist whose book becomes a movie.
What a good novelist does with a throwaway that serves no fictional purpose is throw it away.
I got out of Iowa all set to be a poet and a novelist, but you know what? It’s really tough to make a living as a poet.
A whim, a passing mood, readily induces the novelist to move hearth and home elsewhere. He can always plead work as an excuse to get him out of the clutches of bothersome hosts.
‘The Secret Life of Bees’ was my first novel, so I had no process. I was flying by the seat of my pants, as they say, trying to understand how I, as a novelist, would work with story.
If a novelist has created vivid characters, interesting relationships, settings the reader can easily imagine, and intriguing stories, a screenwriter has loads to work with. The challenge comes with deciding what to cut and what to keep.
In high school, I wanted to be an actress. Until I got to college and took some creative writing courses. Then I decided I wanted to become a novelist.
