The better you know someone, the less well you often see them (and the less well they can therefore be transferred into fiction). They may be so close as to be out of focus, and there is no operating novelist to dispel the blur. - Julian Barnes
No poet or novelist wishes he was the only one who ever lived, but most of them wish they were the only one alive, and quite a number believe their wish has been granted. - W.H. Auden
TZETZE (or TSETSE) FLY, n. An African insect (_Glossina morsitans_) whose bite is commonly regarded as nature's most efficacious remedy for insomnia, though some patients prefer that of the American novelist (_Mendax interminabilis_). - Ambrose Bierce
In my view, the novelist has no right to express his opinions on the things of this world. In creating, he must imitate God: do his job and then shut up. - Gustave Flaubert
My political position springs from my being a novelist. In so far as I am concerned, politics and the novel are an indivisible case and I can categorically state that I became politically committed because I am a novelist, not the opposite. - غسان كنفاني
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. - Norman Mailer
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
The historian records, but the novelist creates. - E.M. Forster
It is the certainty that they possess the truth that makes men cruel. -, novelist, essayist, Nobel laureate (1844-1924) - Anatole France
To annoy or piss off are light offences. I'd say if you abuse the goodness of a novelist or a writer, the truth is, he or she can kill you multiple times or cannibalise you in many antagonist characters. - Angelica Hopes
Henry James would have been vastly improved as a novelist by a few whiffs of the Chicago stockyard. - H. L. Mencken
For a novelist, the gaps in a story are as intriguing as material that still exists. - Sara Sheridan
The novelist uses facts to create a fiction about life. The pornographer uses sexual reality to create sexual illusion. - Marty Rubin
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."(Interview in Writers at Work: The Paris Review Interviews, Eighth Series, ed. George Plimpton, 1988) - John Irving
Since I became a novelist I have discovered that I am biased. Either I think a new novel is worse than mine and I don’t like it, or I suspect it is better than my novels and I don’t like it. - Umberto Eco
Darling, in this family we don't call anyone a novelist who has not written more books than Jane Austen. - Pansy Schneider-Horst
Rules such as "Write what you know," and "Show, don't tell," while doubtlessly grounded in good sense, can be ignored with impunity by any novelist nimble enough to get away with it. There is, in fact, only one rule in writing fiction: Whatever works, works. - Tom Robbins
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
It takes three or four years before the present day sinks in to you as a novelist. It has not just to be accepted in the mind but travel down your spine and fill your body and you can’t respond immediately to immediate events, there is this incubation period.Source: Martin Amis - http://www.euronews.com/2013/06/25/ma...
A detective digs around in the garbage of people's lives. A novelist invents people and then digs around in their garbage. - Joe Gores
For a novelist, a given historic situation is an anthropologic laboratory in which he explores his basic question: What is human existence? - Milan Kundera
Like most novelists, I like to do exactly the opposite of what I'm told. It's in my nature as a novelist. Novelists can't trust anything they haven't seen with their own eyes or touched with their own hands. (Jerusalem Prize acceptance speech, JERUSALEM POST, Feb. 15, 2009) - Haruki Murakami
It is symptomatic of the constricting specialism and the oppressive burden of fact of our time that it has been left to the imagination of a novelist, Marguerite Yourcenar, to create the broadest, the most balanced and in many ways the most authentic interpretation of the affair. - Royston Lambert
Edinburgh is a comfortable puddle for a novelist. - 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
I’d like to be remembered as someone who used their ability as a novelist or as a dramatist to say the things he felt needed to be said about the society while being as entertaining as possible. Because if you don’t entertain, nobody’s listening. - Budd Schulberg
I'm a novelist by trade and my job is to write a story rather than reconstruct actual events. - Sara Sheridan
Liberty of imagination should be the most precious possession of a novelist. To try voluntarily to discover the fettering dogmas of its own inspiration, is a trick worthy of humna perverseness which, after inventing an absurdity, endeavours to find for it a pedigree of distinguished ancestors... - Joseph Conrad
As a child I was an inveterate liar. As opposed to now, I am a Novelist. - John Green
The novelist is more like a pregnant woman who delivers her own child unaided. A messy procedure, with lots of groaning. - David Mitchell
If you only write when inspired, you may be a fairly decent poet, but you'll never be a novelist. - Neil Gaiman
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
As a historical novelist, there are few jobs more retrospective. - Sara Sheridan
Historian: an unsuccessful novelist. - H.L. Mencken
Novelist by day; screenwriter by night. - A.D. Posey
As it is I'm a dated novelist, whom hardly anybody reads, or if they do, most of them don't understand what I am on about. Certainly I wish I had never written Voss, which is going to be everybody's albatross. - Patrick White
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
[Jane] Austen was not a novelist for nothing: she knew that our stories are what make us human, and that listening to someone else's stories -- entering into their feelings, validating their experiences -- is the highest way of acknowledging their humanity, the sweetest form of usefulness. - William Deresiewicz
A chronic invalid has but one thought about his identity: He doesn't want to be a sick man. The rest of the discussion seems frivolous to him-an immense privilege of the healthy. Still, I'm a novelist, and so I pursue it. - Nancy Horan
Read. Read as if your life depended on it because your life as a novelist does. - Louise Doughty
A novelist is a person who lives in other people's skins. - E.L. Doctorow
Lolita is famous, not I. I am an obscure, doubly obscure, novelist with an unpronounceable name. - Vladimir Nabokov
The difference between a novelist and someone who tinkers around with writing is this: novelists finish their books. - Nancy Etchemendy
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
The novelist defines the story with the following example: If you are told that the king died and then the queen died, that is a sequence of events. If you were told that the king died and then the queen died of grief, that is a story that he was interested. - E.M. Forster
I am certain that a novelist is someone who attributes a different reality-value to the characters and events of his story than to those of 'real' life. A novelist is someone who confuses his own life with that of his characters. - Alain Robbe-Grillet
If you don't trust a novelist, who are you going to trust? - Carlos Ruiz Zafón
I believe that only poetry counts ... A great novelist is first of all a great poet. - François Mauriac