Novelist Quotes

“At the heart of the novelist's craft lies an optimism which thinks that the knowledge we gather from our everyday experience, if given proper form, can become valuable knowledge about reality.”
― Orhan Pamuk, The Naive and the Sentimental Novelist

“I think that at the bottom of all art lies the impulse to preserve.”
― Philip Larkin

“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, What I Talk About When I Talk About Running

“God is a novelist. He uses all sorts of literary devices: alliteration, assonance, rhyme, synecdoche, onomatopoeia. But of all of these, His favorite is foreshadowing. And that is what God was doing at the Cloisters and with Eudora Welty. He was foreshadowing. He was laying traps, leaving clues, clues I could have seen had I been perceptive enough.”
― Lauren F. Winner, Girl Meets God

“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 Successful Novelist: A Lifetime of Lessons about Writing and Publishing

“Was the dividing line between life and fiction as hazy for other people as it was for a writer?”
― Dean Koontz, Mr. Murder

“Reading is rapture (or if it isn't, I put the book down meaning to go on with it later, and escape out the side door).”
― William Maxwell

“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

“One has to be just a little crazy to write a great novel.
One must be capable of allowing the darkest, most ancient and shrewd parts of one's being to take over the work from time to time. Or be capable of cracking the door now and then to
the deep craziness of life itself—as when in Anna Karenina, Levin proposes to Kitty in the same weird way Tolstoy himself proposed to his wife. Strangeness is the one quality in fiction that cannot be faked.”
― john gardner, On Becoming a Novelist

“I think there really is no other way to write a long, serious
novel. You work, shelve it for a while, work, shelve it again,
work some more, month after month, year after year, and then
one day you read the whole piece through and, so far as you
can see, there are no mistakes. (The minute it's published and
you read the printed book you see a thousand.) This tortuous
process is not necessary, I suspect, for the writing of a popular
novel in which the characters are not meant to have depth and complexity, where character A is consistently stingy and character
B is consistently openhearted and nobody is a mass of
contradictions, as are real human beings. But for a true novel
there is generally no substitute for slow, slow baking.
We've all heard the stories of Tolstoy's pains over Anna Karenina,
Jane Austen's over Emma, or even Dostoevsky's over Crime and Punishment, a novel he grieved at having to publish prematurely,though he had worked at it much longer than most popular-fiction writers work at their novels.”
― John Gardner, On Becoming a Novelist

“Nothing is sillier than the creative writing teacher's dictum
"Write about what you know." But whether you're writing
about people or dragons, your personal observation of how
things happen in the world—how character reveals itself—can
turn a dead scene into a vital one. Preliminary good advice
might be: Write as if you were a movie camera. Get exactly
what is there. All human beings see with astonishing accuracy,
not that they can necessarily write it down.”
― John Gardner, On Becoming a Novelist

“The question one asks of the young writer who wants to
know if he's got what it takes is this: "Is writing novels what
you want to do? Really want to do?"
If the young writer answers, "Yes," then all one can say is:
Do it. In fact, he will anyway.”
― John Gardner, On Becoming a Novelist

“...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, Big Sur

“I realised early on that being an author is a hugely misunderstood job.”
― Sara Sheridan

“People make interesting assumptions about the profession. The writer is a mysterious figure, wandering lonely as a cloud, fired by inspiration, or perhaps a cocktail or two.”
― Sara Sheridan

“On Twitter, people who had read my book followed me and I could see what else they were reading, why they'd liked what I'd written and by the by, more about them than I'd ever elicit from two minutes in a tent at a book festival, stuck behind a signing desk.”
― Sara Sheridan

“For a novelist, the gaps in a story are as intriguing as material that still exists.”
― Sara Sheridan

“The thought of the novelist that matters most is the thought that makes him a novelist.

The thought of the novelist lies not in the remarks of his characters or even in their introspection but in the plight he has invented for his characters, in the juxtaposition of those characters and in the lifelike ramifications of the ensemble they make — their density, their substantiality, their lived existence actualized in all its nuanced particulars, is in fact his thought metabolized.

The thought of the writer lies in his choice of an aspect of reality previously unexamined in the way that he conducts an examination. The thought of the writer is embedded everywhere in the course of the novel’s action. The thought of the writer is figured invisibly in the elaborate pattern — in the newly emerging constellation of imagined things — that is the architecture of the book: what Aristotle called simply “the arrangement of the parts,” the “matter of size and order.” The thought of the novel is embodied in the moral focus of the novel. The tool with which the novelist thinks is the scrupulosity of his style. Here, in all this, lies whatever magnitude his thought may have.

The novel, then, is in itself his mental world. A novelist is not a tiny cog in the great wheel of human thought. He is a tiny cog in the great wheel of imaginative literature.”
― Philip Roth

“Not writing is never an option. This is not words of advice. It's just literally never an option!”
― Lillian R. Melendez

“I'm a novelist by trade and my job is to write a story rather than reconstruct actual events.”
― Sara Sheridan

“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

“I was asked the other day in which era I would choose to live. As a historical novelist, it comes up sometimes. As a woman I'd have to say I'd like to live in the future - I want to see where these centuries of change are leading us.”
― Sara Sheridan

“It is not so much as to say that something has occured; but to describe the very essence of the occurance. One must take hold of his readers and pull them into his world...the world that he has penned, with the utmost care and attentiveness.
And then, when the readers are fully submerged in this magnificently crafted place of wonder; they will see, and touch, and smell, and feel all the elements of the author's imagination.”
― Jason W. Blair

“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

“As a novelist it is my job to tell stories that inspire and entertain but I am increasingly mindful that many of these historical tales (which of themselves are fascinating) relate directly to our issues in society today.”
― Sara Sheridan

“Edinburgh is a comfortable puddle for a novelist.”
― Sara Sheridan

“As a historical novelist, there are few jobs more retrospective.”
― Sara Sheridan

“I'm a professional writer and I consider it part of my job to publicise my work and these days part of that job is done online.”
― Sara Sheridan

“I spend a lot of time imagining things - in fact, you could say that imagining things is my job.”
― Sara Sheridan

“I remember calling the council's cemetery department to ask about body decomposition in different soil types. Once they had verified that I was a novelist and not a sicko, they were extremely helpful.”
― Sara Sheridan