Novelist Quotes

I gain nothing but pleasure from writing fiction; short stories are foreplay, novellas are heavy petting – but novels are the full monte. Frankly, if I didn't enjoy writing novels I wouldn't do it – the world hardly needs any more and I can think of numerous more useful things someone with my skills could be engaged in. As it is, the immersion in parallel but believable worlds satisfies all my demands for vicarious experience, voyeurism and philosophic calithenics. I even enjoy the mechanics of writing, the dull timpani of the typewriter keys, the making of notes – many notes – and most seducttive of all: the buying of stationery. That the transmogrification of my beautiful thoughts into a grossly imperfect prose is always the end result doesn't faze me: all novels are only a version- there is no Platonic ideal. But I'd go further still: fiction is my way of thinking about and relating to the world; if I don't write I'm not engaged in any praxis, and lose all purchase.

Will Self

Mathias shrugged. After all, a criminal lawyer is not concerned with facts. He is concerned with probabilities. It is the novelist who is concerned with facts, whose job it is to say what a particular man did do on a particular occasion: the lawyer does not, cannot be expected to go further than show what the ordinary man would be most likely to do under presumed circumstances.

Richard Hughes

As a historical novelist, there is very little I like more than spending time sorting through boxes of old letters, diaries, maps, trinkets, and baubles.

Sara Sheridan

...Cody is furiously explaining to his little son Tim 'Never let the right hand know what your left hand is doing'...Page 100.

Jack Kerouac

If your not annoying somebody, you're not alive.

Margaret Atwood

An authors publication date never matters, a book not read yet will always be New"...

Catherine Townsend-Lyon

A short story is a sprint, a novel is a marathon. Sprinters have seconds to get from here to there and then they are finished. Marathoners have to carefully pace themselves so that they don't run out of energy (or in the case of the novelist-- ideas) because they have so far to run. To mix the metaphor, writing a short story is like having a short intense affair, whereas writing a novel is like a long rich marriage.

Jonathan Carroll

No matter how much enthusiasm and effort you put into writing, if you totally lack literary talent you can forget about being a novelist.

Haruki Murakami

As you write your novel, you gradually start thinking like some of your characters in it. And at times the writer may lose himself completely in some character.

Avijeet Das

Persons curious in chronology may, if they like, work out from what they already know of the Wimsey family that the action of the book takes place in 1935; but if they do, they must not be querulously indignant because the King's Jubilee is not mentioned, or because I have arranged the weather and the moon's changes to suit my own fancy. For, however realistic the background, the novelist's only native country is Cloud-Cuckooland, where they do but jest, poison in jest: no offence in the world.

Dorothy L. Sayers

There is one myth about writers that I have always felt was particularly pernicious and untruthful—the myth of the "lonely writer," the myth that writing is a lonely occupation, involving much suffering because, supposedly, the writer exists in a state of sensitivity which cuts him off, or raises him above, or casts him below the community around him. This is a common cliché, a hangover probably from the romantic period and the idea of the artist as a Sufferer and a Rebel.Probably any of the arts that are not performed in a chorus-line are going to come in for a certain amount of romanticizing, but it seems to me particularly bad to do this to writers and especially fiction writers, because fiction writers engage in the homeliest, and most concrete, and most unromanticizable of all arts. I suppose there have been enough genuinely lonely suffering novelists to make this seem a reasonable myth, but there is every reason to suppose that such cases are the result of less admirable qualities in these writers, qualities which have nothing to do with the vocation of writing itself.

Flannery O'Connor

A novelist is essentially a person who covers distance through his patience, slowly, like an ant. A novelist impresses us not by his demonic and romantic vision, but by his patience.

Orhan Pamuk

The pleasures of being a novelist are many. But the greatest by far is the manner in which I live through my characters; experiencing every detail of their story as it unfolds gradually and personally within my own creative psyche. I'm like a cat with untold lives, because each new book is my rebirth.

Richelle E. Goodrich

There are days when writing is within my power and a story unfolds along a course I've already chosen. And then there are days when the words breathe on their own and take me by the hand, leading me along unfathomed paths. Either way, the end result is this author's fairytale.

Richelle E. Goodrich

As a historical novelist, there are few jobs more retrospective.

Sara Sheridan

A deed done to others, but for yourself is not a worthy one at all. Instead, place another before you; in this way, you can be sure your moral compass always points North.

Jason W. Blair

Love is something that is beyond us. We can't anticipate love. When, where and with whom we fall in love is coincidental and wonderful for the same reason.

Santonu Kumar Dhar

Life is full of beautiful moments. Live your life to the fullest. And do what youlove.

Santonu Kumar Dhar

With the right tools, you can write anything ...

Jeff Lyons

Sometimes you can write about a character's day in under a minute and sometimes it takes a day just to write about a minute.

Jennifer V. Clancy

The novelist is more like a pregnant woman who delivers her own child unaided. A messy procedure, with lots of groaning.

David Mitchell

On every page, confidence fights with self-doubt. Every sentence is an act of faith. Why would anybody want to do it?

David Morrell

I realised early on that being an author is a hugely misunderstood job.

Sara Sheridan

Edinburgh is a comfortable puddle for a novelist.

Sara Sheridan

I'm a professional writer and I consider it part of my job to publicise my work and these days part of that job is done online.

Sara Sheridan

Being a novelist is not the sort of thing we can shut off. It infests every bit of us until we lose the boundary between Person and Writer, like one of those color charts where it is impossible to say where the blue stops and the red begins.

Thomm Quackenbush

It is possible to be a great novelist - that is, to render a veracious account of your times - and a bad writer - that is, an incompetent practitioner of applied linguistics.

Angela Carter

I remember calling the council's cemetery department to ask about body decomposition in different soil types. Once they had verified that I was a novelist and not a sicko, they were extremely helpful.

Sara Sheridan

You write once and you can call yourself a writer, but it takes three novels before you can call yourself a novelist. The first two could have just been lucky. One day, I will finish my third, and one day, I will be a novelist.

Michael Kroft

Sometimes I don't even know why I'm writing what I'm writing...I'm just following these people around and taking notes.

P. Anastasia

You do not learn how to write novels in a writing program. You learn how by leading an interesting life. Open yourself up to all experience. Let life pour through you the way light pours through leaves.

Pat Conroy

A friend worth knowing tolerates your flaws while a friend worth keeping loves you in spite of them.

K.E. Garvey

The real novelist, the perfectly simple human being, could go on, indefinitely imaging.

Virginia Woolf

For a novelist, the gaps in a story are as intriguing as material that still exists.

Sara Sheridan

These poems are cupsthat I pour my love into.Here, Drink!

Kamand Kojouri

The novelist is required to create the illusion of a whole world with believable people in it, and the chief difference between the novelist who is an orthodox Christian and the novelist who is merely a naturalist is that the Christian novelist lives in a larger universe. He believes that the natural world contains the supernatural. And this doesn't mean that his obligation to portray the natural is less; it means it is greater.

Flannery O'Connor

On Twitter, people who had read my book followed me and I could see what else they were reading, why they'd liked what I'd written and by the by, more about them than I'd ever elicit from two minutes in a tent at a book festival, stuck behind a signing desk.

Sara Sheridan

A novelist's characters must be with him as he lies down to sleep, and as he wakes from his dreams. He must learn to hate them and to love them.

Anthony Trollope

You sound so miserable.”“All novelists are.

Changdictator

So much of a novelist’s writing … takes place in the unconscious: in those depths the last word is written before the word appears on paper. We remember the details of our story, we do not invent them.

Graham Greene

I guess it’s true: it’s difficult for men to understand women.

Santonu Kumar Dhar

I spend a lot of time imagining things - in fact, you could say that imagining things is my job.

Sara Sheridan

Not writing is never an option. This is not words of advice. It's just literally never an option!

Lillian R. Melendez

I'm not asking you to come reverently or unquestioningly; I'm not asking you to be politically correct or cast aside your sense of humor (please God you have one). This isn't a popularity contest, it's not the moral Olympics, and it's not church. But it's Writing, damn it, not washing the car or putting on eyeliner. If you can take it seriously, we can do business. If you can't or won't, it's time for you to close the book and do something else. Wash the car, maybe.

Stephen King

I think the writer is initially set going by literature more than by life. When there are many writers all employing the same idiom, all looking out on more or less the same social scene, the individual writer will have to be more than ever careful that he isn't just doing badly what has already been done to completion. The presence alone of Faulkner in our midst makes a great difference in what the writer can and cannot permit himself to do. Nobody wants his mule and wagon stalled on the same track the Dixie Limited is roaring down.

Flannery O'Connor

I am, as it were, the created creating—a paradox, for all its rhetorical trappings, at the beating heart of our shared human journey, and one I invite you to struggle with just as I have while, day in and day out, word by word and line by line, constructing a fictitious autobiography for myself in these pages.

Sol Luckman

Bringing a novel to light - revealing the form and cadence, shadows and demeanor of a protagonist constructed from thin air - linking scenes and synchronicity across translucent time - holding up a glass brimming with chilled, never-tasted liquid, then sipping from it with intoxicated focus - allowing lovers to make a perilous mess of things, fall apart and nakedly come back together again - looking through conjured windows deep into someone else’s snow-bound solitude, feeling utterly alone yet being all-connected: this is not writing. It’s world-creating.It’s raw, exposed dreaming. It’s humbling. At first too personal and intimate to share, it evolves like a child into a life of its own until I have no say in what comes next. It’s what I wake at 4am to say Yes to, the spinning possibility of a new story relentlessly commanding me to write it down so it can whirl in your experience.

Laurie Perez

As a novelist it is my job to tell stories that inspire and entertain but I am increasingly mindful that many of these historical tales (which of themselves are fascinating) relate directly to our issues in society today.

Sara Sheridan

I was asked the other day in which era I would choose to live. As a historical novelist, it comes up sometimes. As a woman I'd have to say I'd like to live in the future - I want to see where these centuries of change are leading us.

Sara Sheridan

It is not so much as to say that something has occured; but to describe the very essence of the occurance. One must take hold of his readers and pull them into his world...the world that he has penned, with the utmost care and attentiveness. And then, when the readers are fully submerged in this magnificently crafted place of wonder; they will see, and touch, and smell, and feel all the elements of the author's imagination.

Jason W. Blair

People make interesting assumptions about the profession. The writer is a mysterious figure, wandering lonely as a cloud, fired by inspiration, or perhaps a cocktail or two.

Sara Sheridan

The Adventure called and I followed with my thumb like a character being written by an intractable author. Which, of course, I was.

Sol Luckman

Fiction is overrated, Fly. We’ve discussed this. In the time it takes those novelist fuckers to contemplate a few poetic passages, a thousand kids die from malnutrition. Immediacy, man, that’s what counts.

Rawi Hage

I'll call any length of fiction a story, whether it be a novel or a shorter piece, and I'll call anything a story in which specific characters and events influence each other to form a meaningful narrative. I find that most people know what a story is until they sit down to write one. Then they find themselves writing a sketch with an essay woven through it, or an essay with a sketch woven through it, or an editorial with a character in it, or a case history with a moral, or some other mongrel thing. When they realize that they aren't writing stories, they decide that the remedy for this is to learn something that they refer to as "the technique of the short story" or "the technique of the novel." Technique in the minds of many is something rigid, something like a formula that you impose on the material; but in the best stories it is something organic, something that grows out of the material, and this being the case, it is different for every story of any account that has ever been written.

Flannery O'Connor

How astonishingly intimate the business of fiction is, more intimate than anything that issues from the psychiatrist’s couch or even the lovers’ bed. You see the soul, pinned and wriggling on the wall.

Martin Amis

I'm a novelist by trade and my job is to write a story rather than reconstruct actual events.

Sara Sheridan

I think that at the bottom of all art lies the impulse to preserve.

Philip Larkin

In the very end, all we have left to atone for our faults are words.

Kamand Kojouri

Moonrise is a fabulous novel and my damn wife wrote it and that’s me up there near Highlands shouting it out to the hills.

Pat Conroy

I've written you sixty-seven love poems.Here’s another one for you.But really, for me.These poems are the candles that I light with the fire you have ignited in me.I place this candle here and another thereso even if the stars have argued with the moonand are sulking away in a corner, you can still find your way to me.Sixty-eight poems now. What does the future hold for us?Joy? Disappointment? Gentle caresses? And subtle neglect?I hope the good is more than the bad. Much more. For what is the point of loveif by lighting these candlesour own flame loses its brightness?I know the good is more than the bad. Much more.I cannot wait to write you sixty-nine.

Kamand Kojouri

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