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Novelists tell that piece of truth hidden at the bottom of every lie. -- Italo Calvino
The bicycle, the bicycle surely, should always be the vehicle of novelists and poets. -- Christopher Morley
Novelists are stamina merchants, grinders, nine-to-fivers, and their career curves follow the usual arc of human endeavour. -- Martin Amis
Novelists have always had complete freedom to pretty much tell their story any way they saw fit. And that's what I'm trying to do. -- Quentin Tarantino
A petty reason perhaps why novelists more and more try to keep a distance from journalists is that novelists are trying to write the truth and journalists are trying to write fiction. -- Graham Greene
Novelists do not write as birds sing, by the push of nature. It is part of the job that there should be much routine and some daily stuff on the level of carpentry. -- William Golding
The light that radiates from the great novels time can never dim, for human existence is perpetually being forgotten by man and thus the novelists' discoveries, however old they may be, will never cease to astonish. -- Milan Kundera
I think I belong to America's last generation of novelists. Novelists will come one by one from now on, not in seeming families, and will perhaps write only one or two novels, and let it go at that. -- Kurt Vonnegut
Novelists are not equipped to make a movie, in my opinion. They make their own movie when they write: they're casting, they're dressing the scene, they're working out where the energy of the scene is coming from and they're also relying tremendously on the creative imagination of the reader. -- John le Carre
Novelists never have to footnote. -- Jane Smiley
Novelists want to flood, poets want to distill. -- J. D. McClatchy
Novelists should be like scientists, dissecting the cadaver. -- J. G. Ballard
Novelists and poets have existed side by side forever. -- Stan Brakhage
God gets the great stories. Novelists must make do with more mundane fictions. -- Richard Flanagan
Novelists should never allow themselves to weary of the study of real life. -- Charlotte Bronte
Novelists have to love humanity to write anything worthwhile. Poets have to love themselves. -- Marita Golden
Novelists don't age as quickly as philosophers, who often face professional senility in their late twenties. -- Martin Amis
Novelists are always resisting autobiographical readings of their work, because they know how false those can be. -- Jeffrey Eugenides
Most writers are not quick-witted when they talk. Novelists, in particular, drag themselves around in society like gut-shot bears. -- Kurt Vonnegut
Novelists... fashioning nets to sustain and support the reader as he falls helplessly through the chaos of his own existence. -- Fay Weldon
Novelists get to direct the perfect films. We get to cast every part. We dress the set exactly as we wish. -- Jonathan Lethem
In Hollywood, they think they know it all. You, as a writer, are essentially an outsider. Novelists and short-story writers, especially. -- Ray Bradbury
Novelists have to be adept at controlling the flow of information, and, most crucially, they have to be in charge of the narrative. -- Ian Mcewan
Novelists may be able to seek advice from readers and editors, but in the end, it is up to them to get the book right. -- Jon Weisman
Novelists are in the business of constructing consciousness out of words, and that's what we all do, cradle to grave. The self is a story we tell. -- James Gleick
Novelists are people who have discovered that they can dampen their neuroses by writing make-believe. We will keep on doing that no matter what, while offering loftier explanations. -- Kurt Vonnegut
Novelists who treat violence and cruelty as something to be exploited for their effect, or to enjoy the pleasure of an evacuation, are carriers of a singularly unpleasant disease. -- Storm Jameson
Novelists of a conservative or more purely aesthetic bent hold up better on the surface, but their novels go in and out of fashion according to relevance or irrelevance. -- Jane Smiley
Novelists who get shitty about screenwriting invariably can't do it, or they can't hack it in the world of what's really, in truth, very bold and very public enterprise. -- William Monahan
Novelists tend to go off at 70, and I'm in a funk about it, I've got myself into a real paranoid funk about it, how the talent dies before the body. -- Martin Amis
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Short-story writing requires an exquisite sense of balance. Novelists, frankly, can get away with more. A novel can have a dull spot or two, because the reader has made a different commitment. -- Lynn Abbey
Novelists go about the strenuous business of marrying and burying their people, or else they send them to sea, or to Africa, or at the least, out of town. Essayists in their stillness ponder love and death. -- Cynthia Ozick
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I couldn't think about novels at all. It seemed the only writing that was appropriate to that horrendous event was journalism, reportage. And, in fact, I think the profession rose quite honorably to the task. Novelists require a slower turnover, I mean, in time. -- Ian Mcewan
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
I envied women with signature hair-dos, signature perfumes, signature sign-offs. Novelists who tell Vogue Magazine: "I can't live without my Smythson notebook, Pomegranate Noir cologne by Jo Malone and Frette sheetsâ?. In the grip of madness, materialism begins to look like an admirable belief system. -- Emma Forrest
And then, as if written by the hand of a bad novelist, an incredible thing happened. -- Jonathan Stroud
A novelist should not be too intelligent either, although... he may be permitted to be an intellectual. -- Anthony Burgess
The business of the novelist is not to relate great events, but to make small ones interesting. -- Arthur Schopenhauer
Expansion, that is the idea the novelist must cling to, not completion, not rounding off, but opening out. -- E. M. Forster
I recognize myself to be an intensely naive person. Most novelists are, despite frequent pretensions to deep socio-political insight. -- Zadie Smith
Kingsley Amis was one of a trio of brilliant comic novelists who made English literature sparkle in the twentieth century. -- Russell Baker
The truth is that I know very few novelists who have been satisfied with the adaptation of their books for the screen. -- Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Novels are fictions and therefore they tell lies, but through those lies every novelist attempts to tell the truth about the world. -- Paul Auster
The novelist must be his own most harsh critic and also his own most loving admirer and about both he must say nothing. -- Angus Wilson
There are many reasons why novelists write, but they all have one thing in common - a need to create an alternative world. -- John Fowles
All novelists write in a different way, but I always write in longhand and then do two versions of typescript on a computer. -- Martin Amis
I have always loved short stories. I have been at least as influenced by the short story masters as I have been by novelists. -- Daniel Woodrell
If you want to be a psychological novelist and write about human beings, the best thing you can do is keep a pair of cats. -- Aldous Huxley
Things were easier for the old novelists who saw people all of a piece. Speaking generally, their heroes were good through and through, their villains wholly bad. -- W. Somerset Maugham
I had always thought that the idea of love at first sight was one of those things invented by lady novelists from the South with three names. -- John Perry Barlow
If this were fiction, could even the most brilliant novelist contrive to make credible so short a period in which pride had been subdued and prejudice overcome? -- P. D. James
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. -- John Irving
Shun security,' I advise aspiring novelists when they complain to me that they are stuck. 'Get disoriented. Maybe your agonizing writing block isn't agonizing enough. Your enemy is comfort.' -- John Burdett
It is fatal to know too much at the outcome: boredom comes as quickly to the traveler who knows his route as to the novelist who is over certain of his plot. -- Paul Theroux
I cannot and do not live in the world of discretion, not as a writer, anyway. I would prefer to, I assure you - it would make life easier. But discretion is, unfortunately, not for novelists. -- Philip Roth
I was once a graduate student in Victorian literature, and I believe as the Victorian novelists did, that a novel isn't simply a vehicle for private expression, but that it also exists for social examination. I firmly believe this. -- Margaret Atwood
For novelists or musicians, if they really want to create something, they need to go downstairs and find a passage to get into the second basement. What I want to do is go down there, but still stay sane. -- Haruki Murakami
So far as love or affection is concerned, psychologists have failed in their mission. The little we know about love does not transcend simple observation, and the little we write about it has been written better by poets and novelists. -- Harry Harlow
The first duty of the novelist is to entertain. It is a moral duty. People who read your books are sick, sad, traveling, in the hospital waiting room while someone is dying. Books are written by the alone for the alone. -- Donna Tartt
I'm a failed poet. Maybe every novelist wants to write poetry first, finds he can't and then tries the short story which is the most demanding form after poetry. And failing at that, only then does he take up novel writing. -- William Faulkner
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. -- Ghassan Kanafani
I think there are a lot of really positive aspects to social media for novelists. Even though our work is pretty solitary, through Twitter and Tumblr and Facebook and Instagram and blogging in general, we're better able to connect directly with readers. -- Holly Black
History is the history of human behavior, and human behavior is the raw material of fiction. Most people recognize that novelists do research to get the facts right - how a glove factory works, for example, or how courtesans in imperial Japan dressed. -- Amy Waldman
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
I don't know who said that novelists read the novels of others only to figure out how they are written. I believe it's true. We aren't satisfied with the secrets exposed on the surface of the page: we turn the book around to find the seams. -- Gabriel Garcia Marquez
I think novelists are in the education business, really, but they're not teaching you times tables, they are teaching you responsiveness and morality and to make nuanced judgments. And really to just make the planet look a bit richer when you go out into the street. -- Martin Amis
Do we value privacy in any real way? Thinking about blogs, Twitter, Facebook, MySpace... all these suggest we value exposure rather more. And instead of challenging this transformation, as they are supposed to - certainly at the more thoughtful edges of the art - novelists are buying into it wholesale. -- Guy Gavriel Kay
I suspect there are two kinds of novelists. Those who have a point of view and have something to say and then write a novel in order to say that thing, and those of us who write the book in order to find out what we think about that thing. -- Neil Gaiman
That's the most terrible thing about being an author - standing there at your mother's funeral, but you don't switch the author off. So your own innermost thoughts are grist for the mill. Who was it said - one of the famous lady novelists - 'unhappy is the family that contains an author'? -- Terry Pratchett
Novelists who pretend to understand what keeps them scribbling are really just guessing. A profound, unmet childish need to be acknowledged? Maybe. It hardly matters, though. The termite that asks itself why it keeps chewing risks becoming sluggish and inefficient, as does the writer who grows self-conscious in the middle of chapter five. -- Walter Kirn
I'm a very good storyteller; I have a lot of compassion for people. That's very useful for a novelist. A lot of novelists are snots. They're just mean people. I'm not a terribly skilled stylist, nor do I want to be. I want a lot of people to read one of my stories and go, 'That was pretty cool.' -- James Patterson
Novelists are perhaps the last people in the world to be entrusted with opinions. The nature of a novel is that it has no opinions, only the dialectic of contrary views, some of which, all of which, may be untenable and even silly. A novelist should not be too intelligent either, although he may be permitted to be an intellectual. -- Anthony Burgess
What terrorists gain, novelists lose. -- Don DeLillo
All good novelists have bad memories. -- Graham Greene
Most novelists write about twisted lives. -- Tom Robbins
The novel is resilient, and so are novelists. -- John Banville
Teaching has ruined more American novelists than drink. -- Gore Vidal
I like novelists who can create other interesting worlds. -- Kazuo Ishiguro
I'm more influenced by novelists than I am by filmmakers. -- Billy Bob Thornton
Not all novelists are power-hungry madman. Some are power-hungry madwomen. -- Pseudonymous Bosch
The makers of the short story have rarely been good novelists. -- V. S. Pritchett
Great novelists are philosopher-novelists who write in images instead of arguments. -- Albert Camus
Unfortunately for novelists, real life is getting way too funny and far-fetched. -- Carl Hiaasen
Human nature provides the lyrics, and we novelists just compose the music. -- Carlos Ruiz Zafon
The novel is just fine: It's novelists who aren't doing so well. -- Russell Smith
Historians tell the story of the past, novelists the story of the present. -- Edmond de Goncourt
While victors may get to write history, novelists get to write/right reality. -- M.T. Bass
Sometimes I think that novelists suffer from P.C.S.: Perpetual Childhood Syndrome. -- Simon Mawer
Drawing Dead is a brilliant noir from one of Australia's most exciting new novelists. -- Adrian McKinty
All novelists should live in two different worlds: a real one and an unreal one. -- John Fowles
That is the dream of all novelists-that one of their characters will become 'somebody.' -- Jose Saramago
Not all popular novelists are good, but all good novelists are, sooner or later, popular. -- Dean Koontz
I sometimes think novelists write about sex in order to avoid boring themselves to death. -- Walker Percy
It is in their 'good' characters that novelists make, unawares, the most shocking self- revelations. -- C. S. Lewis
Southerners make good novelists: they have so many stories because they have so much family. -- Gore Vidal
Poets think in short lines. Unless you're Samuel Beckett, Twitter might be more difficult for novelists. -- Kenneth Goldsmith
Having judged a few competitions, it's clear that novelists are often the laziest short story writers. -- Sarah Hall
One connection I see between novelists and terrorists is that we both attempt to alter consciousness. -- Don DeLillo
I started writing short fiction very briefly, as I imagine is the case for some novelists. -- William Gibson
America may have great poets and novelists, but she never will have more than one necromancer. -- Rebecca Harding Davis
Once upon a time, novelists of the 19th century, such as Charles Dickens, published in serial form. -- Margaret Atwood
Alternate history fascinates me, as it fascinates all novelists, because 'What if?' is the big thing. -- Kate Atkinson
I think, in common with a lot of novelists, I wasn't the most athletic guy at school. -- Chris Cleave
Today there are a lot of novelists who seem to be writing to be reviewed, not read. -- Pete Hamill
I've known several spies who have wanted to become novelists. And novelists who became spies, of course. -- Christopher Koch
I think most novelists I know, certainly including me, feel the novels choose them rather than vice-versa. -- Steve Erickson
Great sorrow or great joy should bring intense hunger--not abstinence from food, as our novelists will have it. -- Arthur Conan Doyle
The difference between a novelist and someone who tinkers around with writing is this: novelists finish their books. -- Nancy Etchemendy
To what degree are historians chroniclers of the truth and to what degree are they just novelists, frankly? -- Peter Morgan
You could do math early, but there are no brilliant 16-year-old novelists. They don't know the human condition yet. -- Neil deGrasse Tyson
Some novelists want to give people in history a voice because they have been denied it in the past. -- Antony Beevor
At the meeting you behaves exactly as Marathi novelists of the last century tell is husbands do in sari shops. -- Sachin Kundalkar
You tell me your favorite novelists and I'll tell you whom you vote for, or whether you vote at all. -- Stephen Vizinczey
I know I'm a rare person, a trained scientist who writes fiction, because so few contemporary novelists engage with science. -- Barbara Kingsolver
Thank God for novelists. Thank God there are people willing to write everything down. Otherwise, so much would be forgotten. -- Kurt Vonnegut
Rebecca Goldstein is a rare find among contemporary novelists: she has intellectual muscle as well as a tender emotional reach. -- Ian Mcewan
I saw novelists as being admirable people and I thought... I thought... maybe, one day, I could be one of them. -- Michael Palin

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