Novelist Quotes

“Nothing travels faster than the speed of light, with the possible exception of bad news, which obeys its own special laws.”
― Douglas Adams, Mostly Harmless

“There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book.
Books are well written, or badly written. That is all.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

“Reading poetry is like undressing before a bath. You don't undress out of fear that your clothes will become wet. You undress because you want the water to touch you. You want to completely immerse yourself in the feeling of the water and to emerge anew.”
― Kamand Kojouri

“Who is better off? The one who writes to revel in the voluptuousness of the life that surrounds them? Or the one who writes to escape the tediousness of that which awaits them outside? Whose flame will last longer?”
― Roman Payne

“Poetry isn’t an island, it is the bridge.
Poetry isn’t a ship, it is the lifeboat.
Poetry isn’t swimming. Poetry is water.”
― Kamand Kojouri

“You sound so miserable.”

“All novelists are.”
― Changdictator

“If your not annoying somebody, you're not alive.”
― Margaret Atwood

“Rich will be my life if I
can keep my memories full
and brimming, and record
them on clear-eyed
mornings while I set
joyously to work setting
pen to holy craft.”
― Roman Payne, Rooftop Soliloquy

“To make an exceptional living with a career as a writer, you need multiple sources of writing income to sustain lifelong earnings. Never depend on only one origin of income as a novelist.”
― Chris Mentillo

“The real novelist, the perfectly simple human being, could go on, indefinitely imaging. ”
― Virginia Woolf, The Waves

“If you hear voices, you’re a lunatic. If you write down what they say, you’re an author.”
― Dani Harper

“I ran across an excerpt today (in English translation) of some dialogue/narration from the modern popular writer, Paulo Coelho in his book: Aleph.(Note: bracketed text is mine.)... 'I spoke to three scholars,' [the character says 'at last.'] ...two of them said that, after death, the [sic (misprint, fault of the publisher)] just go to Paradise. The third one, though, told me to consult some verses from the Koran. [end quote]' ...I can see that he's excited. [narrator]' ...Now I have many positive things to say about Coelho: He is respectable, inspiring as a man, a truth-seeker, and an appealing writer; but one should hesitate to call him a 'literary' writer based on this quote. A 'literary' author knows that a character's excitement should be 'shown' in his or her dialogue and not in the narrator's commentary on it. Advice for Coelho: Remove the 'I can see that he's excited' sentence and show his excitement in the phrasing of his quote.(Now, in defense of Coelho, I am firmly of the opinion, having myself written plenty of prose that is flawed, that a novelist should be forgiven for slipping here and there.)Lastly, it appears that a belief in reincarnation is of great interest to Mr. Coelho ... Just think! He is a man who has achieved, (as Leonard Cohen would call it), 'a remote human possibility.' He has won lots of fame and tons of money. And yet, how his preoccupation with reincarnation—none other than an interest in being born again as somebody else—suggests that he is not happy!”
― Roman Payne

“You do not learn how to write novels in a writing program. You learn how by leading an interesting life. Open yourself up to all experience. Let life pour through you the way light pours through leaves.”
― Pat Conroy, My Losing Season: A Memoir

“I only wrote prose before I met you.
My musings were superfluous and serious as well.
But now the words dance with me.
I sing with them
and we create poetry.”
― Kamand Kojouri

“In Maurice I tried to create a character who was completely unlike myself or what I supposed myself to be: someone handsome, healthy, bodily attractive, mentally torpid, not a bad business man and rather a snob. Into this mixture I dropped an ingredient that puzzles him, wakes him up, torments him and finally saves him.”
― E. M. Forster

“The novelist works neither to correct nor to condone, not at all to comfort, but to make what's told alive.”
― Eudora Welty, On Writing

“The difference between a novelist and someone who tinkers around with writing is this: novelists finish their books.”
― Nancy Etchemendy

“This was what I came to found. The conquest of loneliness was the missing link that was one day going to make a decent novelist out of me. If you are out here and cannot close off the loves and hates of all that back there in the real world the memories will overtake you and swamp you and wilt your tenacity. Tenacity stamina... close off to everything and everyone but your writing. That s the bloody price. I don t know maybe it's some kind of ultimate selfishness. Maybe it's part of the killer instinct. Unless you can stash away and bury thoughts of your greatest love you cannot sustain the kind of concentration that breaks most men trying to write a book over a three or four year period.”
― Leon Uris

“On my website there's a quote from the writer Anthony Burgess: "The greatest gift is the passion for reading. It is cheap, it consoles, it distracts, it excites, it gives you knowledge of the world and experience of a wide kind."

I've always found that inspiring because the written word, as an art form, is unlike any other: movies, TV, music, they're shared experiences, but books aren't like that. The relationship between a writer and a reader is utterly unique to those two individuals. The world that forms in your head as you read a book will be slightly different to that experienced by every other reader. Anywhere. Ever. Reading is very personal, a communication from one mind to another, something which can't be exactly copied, or replicated, or directly shared.

If I read the work of, say, one of the great Victorian novelists, it's like a gift from the past, a momentary connection to another's thoughts. Their ideas are down on paper, to be picked up by me, over a century later. Writers can speak individually to readers across a year, or ten years, or a thousand.

That's why I love books.”
― Simon Cheshire

“A novelist is an elephant, but an elephant who must pretend to forget.”
― Mary McCarthy

“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, A High Wind in Jamaica

“Now that I was a novelist, I could not face the ignominy of failing to produce novels.”
― Thomas Keneally, Searching for Schindler: A Memoir

“A friend worth knowing tolerates your flaws while a friend worth keeping loves you in spite of them.”
― Kathy Reinhart

“I wish people would think of me as a musician who writes novels, instead of a novelist who writes music on the side.”
― Anthony Burgess

“The novel should tell the truth, as I see the truth, or as the novelist persuades me to see it. And one more demand: I expect the novelist to aspire to improve the world. ... As a novelist, I want to be more than one more dog barking at the other dogs barking at me. Not out of any foolish hope that one novelist, or all virtuous novelists in chorus, can make much of a difference for good, except in the long run, but out of the need to prevent the human world from relaxing into something worse. To maintain the tension between truth and falsity, beauty and ugliness, good and evil. ... I believe the highest duty of the serious novelist is, whatever the means or technique, to be a critic of his society, to hold society to its own ideals, or if these ideals are unworthy, to suggest better ideals.”
― Edward Abbey, Postcards from Ed: Dispatches and Salvos from an American Iconoclast

“The novelist now usurps the chair of the educator, the pulpit of the preacher, the columns of the journalist. Yet his original purpose of entertaining may have been his highest purpose. (introduction to Gladiator, Book League Monthly, 1930)”
― Philip Wylie

“Novelists don't normally write about what's going on; they write about what's not going on.”
― Martin Amis, The Second Plane: September 11, 2001-2007

“Çünkü bana göre siyaset, en sonunda bizim gibi olmayanları kararlılıkla anlamama, romancılık ise anlama işidir.”
― Orhan Pamuk, The Naive and the Sentimental Novelist

“Novelist: Telling lies for fun and profit.”
― Marilyn Celeste Morris

“چون اگر «پرده باز» در آغاز از راز پشت پرده بگويد. «پرده بردار» بايد بمويد. بايد باد بخورد! پرده بَر دار...”
― بهمن بابایی, روز درگذشت