Novelist Quotes

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

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

~ David Morrell

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

~ David Mitchell

Novelists don't normally write about what's going on, they write about what's not going on.

~ Martin Amis

Try everything, listen to everyone. Follow no one. You are your own story guru!

~ Jeff Lyons

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

~ Jeff Lyons

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

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

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

~ Sara Sheridan

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

~ Catherine Townsend-Lyon

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

~ Margaret Atwood

...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

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

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

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