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Novelist-Citizen of Two Countries Interpreter of his Generation on both Sides of the Sea. -- Henry James
As a child I was an inveterate liar. As opposed to now, I am a Novelist. -- John Green
The Novelist, afraid his ideas may be foolish, slyly puts them in the mouth of some other fool and reserves the right to disavow them. -- Diane Johnson
The Electroshock Novelist: The Alluring Bad Boy of Literary England Has Always Been Fascinated by Britain's Dustbin Empire. Now Martin Amis Takes On American Excess, -- Sam Tanenhaus
Novelist time is reptile time; novelists tend to be ruminant and brooding, nursers of ancient grievances, second-guessers, Tuesday afternoon quarterbacks, retrospectators, endlessly, like slumping hitters, studying the film of their old whiffs. -- Michael Chabon
Historian: an unsuccessful novelist. -- H. L. Mencken
I am a fictionalizing philosopher, not a novelist. -- Philip K. Dick
Not until my middle thirties did I consider myself a novelist. -- Rita Mae Brown
A novelist can get by on story, but the poet has nothing but the words. -- Janet Fitch
The historian will tell you what happened. The novelist will tell you what it felt like. -- E. L. Doctorow
A filmmaker has almost the same freedom as a novelist has when he buys himself some paper. -- Stanley Kubrick
I'm a big, bombastic novelist and thrill-ride guy. I'm never going to win the National Book Award. -- Seth Grahame-Smith
As an historical novelist - there are few jobs more retrospective. I dumped science at an early age. -- Sara Sheridan
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. -- Rick Riordan
What description of clouds and sunsets was to the old novelist, description of scientific apparatus and methods is to the modern Scientific Detective writer. -- Hugo Gernsback
The suspense of a novel is not only in the reader, but in the novelist, who is intensely curious about what will happen to the hero. -- Mary McCarthy
A novelist who writes nothing for 10 years finds his reputation rising. Because I keep on producing books they say there must be something wrong with this fellow. -- J. B. Priestley
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. -- Colum McCann
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
The artist deals in what cannot be said in words. The artist whose medium is fiction does this in words. The novelist says in words what cannot be said in words. -- Ursula K. Le Guin
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. -- David Mitchell
It is not the first duty of the novelist to provide blueprints for insurrection, or uplifting tales of successful resistance for the benefit of the opposition. The naming of what is there is what is important. -- Ian Mcewan
A house with any kind of age will have dozens of stories to tell. I suppose if a novelist could live long enough, one could base an entire oeuvre on the lives that weave in and out of an antique house. -- Anita Shreve
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. -- Paul Theroux
That balance between involvement and detachment is what novelists do. It's the ideal relationship between a novelist and a character, I think, total involvement and identity and empathy, stopping short of being autobiographical - in my case, anyway - but also quite detached. -- Pat Barker
It's like a novelist writing far out things. If it makes a point and makes sense, then people like to read that. But if it's off in left field and goes over the edge, you lose it. The same with musical talent, I think. -- Johnny Cash
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To sing a song is quite different than to write a poem. I'm not and never will be a novelist, but to write a novel is not the same thing as writing a play. There is a difference in form, but essentially what you're after is the same thing. -- Sam Shepard
In journalism just one fact that is false prejudices the entire work. In contrast, in fiction one single fact that is true gives legitimacy to the entire work. That's the only difference, and it lies in the commitment of the writer. A novelist can do anything he wants so long as he makes people believe in it. -- Gabriel Garcia Marquez
For a spy novelist like me, the Edward J. Snowden story has everything. A man driven by ego and idealism - can anyone ever distinguish the two? - leaves his job and his beautiful girlfriend behind. He must tell the world the Panopticon has arrived. His masters vow to punish him, and he heads for Moscow in a desperate search for refuge. -- Alex Berenson
There ought to be more grants that go to people in their late twenties and early thirties. That's a crucial age, although it's very hard to judge who is worth supporting and who is not. Looking back on my own life, I see that was the period when I was closest to giving up as a novelist and when I most needed some encouragement. -- Edmund White
Freud was just a novelist. -- Peter Ackroyd
God pity the poor novelist. -- Steven Millhauser
I am a novelist at heart. -- Vera Nazarian
The historian records, but the novelist creates. -- E. M. Forster
Every novelist should possess a hermaphroditic imagination. -- Jeffrey Eugenides
I just saw myself as a novelist. -- Stephen King
I'm a novelist, period. An American novelist. -- Don DeLillo
An urban novelist never minds a little decay. -- Jane Smiley
Every Observer writer wants to be a novelist. -- Jared Kushner
Edinburgh is a comfortable puddle for a novelist. -- Sara Sheridan
Curiosity is the prime requisite of the novelist. -- Lucy Poate Stebbins
The most original novelist now writing in English. -- Ivy Compton-Burnett
The novelist is frequently considered to be an impediment. -- Matthew Specktor
You become a serious novelist by living long enough. -- Don DeLillo
Personally, I have never wished I were a male novelist. -- Curtis Sittenfeld
I'm a novelist, not a social scientist or a commentator. -- Rachel Cusk
My temperament is not geared to that of a novelist. -- Philip Levine
A novelist can't be without a kimono and pen!(Shigure) -- Natsuki Takaya
A novelist is a man who doesn't like his mother. -- Georges Simenon
I thought I wanted to be a journalist or a novelist. -- Lena Dunham
A novelist is a person who lives in other people's skins. -- E. L. Doctorow
Life is a very bad novelist. It is chaotic and ludicrous. -- Javier MarÃas
My father was a screenwriter, but he was also a novelist. -- Sadie Jones
Essential characteristic of the really great novelist: a Christ-like, all-embracing compassion. -- Arnold Bennett
As a novelist, I'm endlessly fascinated by human behavior and interactions. -- Juliet Marillier
I'm a novelist. Fortunately I don't have to rule the world. -- Salman Rushdie
I am a better novelist than a poet, playwright, or essayist. -- Jose Saramago
The biggest downside to being a novelist is writing the novel. -- Jill Barnett
It is the job of the novelist to touch the reader. -- Elizabeth George
I stopped being an engaged journalist and became a disengaged novelist. -- Jim Crace
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The novelist teaches the reader to comprehend the world as a question, -- Milan Kundera
A novelist needs to know his own strong points and weak points. -- David Mitchell
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The novelist must ground his work in faithful study of human nature. -- Goldwin Smith
The craft of the novelist does lie first of all in story-telling. -- Elizabeth Bowen
The real novelist, the perfectly simple human being, could go on, indefinitely imaging. -- Virginia Woolf
Every novelist should write something for children at least once in his lifetime. -- Henryk Sienkiewicz
Before I became a suspense novelist, I wrote romantic suspense as Alicia Scott. -- Lisa Gardner
A novelist is an elephant, but an elephant who must pretend to forget. -- Mary McCarthy
One more recent novelist to come along is Cormac McCarthy. Him, I like. -- Leslie Fiedler
I'm a novelist, so I can't write about ideas unless they're attached to people. -- Julian Barnes
By measuring individual human worth, the novelist reveals the full enormity of the State -- Ian Mcewan
I don't really consider myself a novelist, it just came out purely by accident. -- Wole Soyinka
Political novels are full of pitfalls, particularly for a novelist with strong political leanings. -- Phil Klay
For a novelist, it's kind of an onerous burden to represent an entire culture. -- Khaled Hosseini
Every novelist has a different purpose-and often several purposes which might even be contradictory. -- Irwin Shaw
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The novelist, quite rightly, fears the psychoanalyst as both an enemy and a usurper. -- Will Self
The novelist's intuition for the sacred differs from the translator's interrogation of the sacred. -- Cynthia Ozick
Don't be a novelist --- be a statistician. Much more scope for the imagination. -- Darrell Huff
I had thought of writing, actually, and that later on I'd be a novelist. -- Francois Truffaut
The novel, for me, was an accident. I really don't consider myself a novelist. -- Wole Soyinka
The great thing about being a novelist is that you organize your own day. -- Sophie Kinsella
The passion for fact in a raw state is a peculiarity of the novelist. -- Mary McCarthy
The function of the novelist... is to comment upon life as he sees it. -- Frank Norris
Talents of the novelist: ... observation of character, analysis of emotion, people's feelings, personal relations ... -- Virginia Woolf
A novelist has a specific poetic license which also applies to his own life. -- Jerzy Kosinski
Whether he be an original or a plagiarist, man is the novelist of himself. -- Jose Ortega y Gasset
I started my career as a novelist. 'Veronica Mars' was first imagined as a novel. -- Rob Thomas
I'm a very old-fashioned novelist. I write 19th-century novels, where a lot of rules apply. -- John Irving
Miss Austen had shown the infinite possibilities of ordinary and present things for the novelist. -- George Saintsbury
To be a novelist, all I need is a pen and a piece of paper. -- Quentin Tarantino
The pull of history has been a strong theme in my life as a novelist. -- Anita Shreve
Lawrence Kelter is an exciting new novelist, who reminds me of an early Robert Ludlum. -- Nelson DeMille
I've always thought a novelist only has one character and that is himself or herself. -- John Gregory Dunne
I hated being a novelist when I was 20 - I had nothing to write about. -- A. S. Byatt
I am not much of a researcher as a novelist; I write mainly from experience. -- Mohsin Hamid
Well I'm not a novelist. I've only written one book and that is a memoir. -- Carly Fiorina
I'm a novelist, that's how I make my livelihood, and I concentrate on the novels. -- David Mitchell
I consider myself foremost a novelist with the intent of crafting stories that people will remember. -- Nicholas Sparks
I don't think any novelist should be concerned with literature"¦literature should be left to essayists. -- Jacqueline Susann
Being an unpublished novelist has about as much social acceptability as being a shopping bag lady. -- James Frey
Proust was the greatest novelist of the twentieth century, just as Tolstoy was in the nineteenth. -- Marcel Proust
Lolita is famous, not I. I am an obscure, doubly obscure, novelist with an unpronounceable name. -- Vladimir Nabokov
My paternal grandfather was a failed novelist. He stacked boxes of rejected manuscripts in a closet. -- Laird Barron
A novelist is on the cusp between someone who knows everything and someone who knows nothing. -- Jane Smiley
Just as the painter thinks with his brush and paints the novelist thinks with his story. -- W. Somerset Maugham
I do think there's some aspect of being a novelist that is a little crazy making. -- Anna Quindlen
For a novelist, the gaps in a story are as intriguing as material that still exists. -- Sara Sheridan
As a novelist, you have to be free. Books can't be an act of filial duty. -- Richard Flanagan
And then, as if written by the hand of a bad novelist, an incredible thing happened. -- Jonathan Stroud
I believe that only poetry counts ... A great novelist is first of all a great poet. -- Francois Mauriac
I'm not a philosopher. I am the next thing to a jock, which is a novelist. -- Frederick Busch
For years, I felt I was a novelist, but now I know I can write short fiction. -- Jill McCorkle
The business of the novelist is not to relate great events, but to make small ones interesting. -- Arthur Schopenhauer
I'm not a novelist, I'm a storyteller. There is no art in what I do, no mystique. -- Alistair MacLean
I think that's the most important job of a novelist - to bring authority to their writing. -- Maria Semple
Where does any novelist pick up any character? For the most part, in town, to be sure. -- Herman Melville

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