Top Novelists Quotes

Copywriters, journalists, mainstream authors, ghostwriters, bloggers and advertising creatives have as much right to think of themselves as good writers as academics, poets, or literary novelists.

He had entered another imaginative world, one connected to the beginning of his life as a writer, to the Napoleonic world that had been a lifelong metaphor for the power of art, for the empire of his...

The novelist is condemned to wander all his life. Homeless and blind like Oedipus he wanders until death. And so let us protect the novelist and adore him, with pity, honor, and love.

The only time I've ever learned anything from a review was when wrote a piece in the Guardian about my second novel, . He said that, together with the previous novel, it represented a diptych about t...

The writing talent of Edinburgh is textured - we have poets, novelists, non-fiction writers, dramatists and more.

A novelist can’t be without a kimono and pen!(Shigure)

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 a...

For the novelist or poet, for the scientist or artist, the question is not do ideas come from, the question is how they come. The is the mystery. The how is fragile.

Novelists should never allow themselves to weary of the study of real life. If they observed this duty conscientiously, they would give us fewer pictures chequered with vivid contrasts of light and sh...

They know a million tricks, those novelists. Take Doctor Goebbels; that's how he started out, writing fiction. Appeals to the base lusts that hide in everyone no matter how respectable on the surface....

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...

To be motivated to write a novel, I need to be unable not to write.

Grabbing readers by the imagination is a writer's job.

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.

Read a thousand books, and your words will flow like a river.

But the other Ministers considered that to employ a magician was one thing, novelists were quite another and they would not stoop to it.

I now understand that writing fiction was a seed planted in my soul, though I would not be ready to grow that seed for a long time.

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.

Novelists are basically inviting their readers to play a game of pretend. That's what fiction is: a game of pretend.

We have a rich literature. But sometimes it’s a literature too ready to be neutralized, to be incorporated into the ambient noise. This is why we need the writer in opposition, the novelist who writes...