Novelists quotes
488 quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
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Browse quotes that often appear alongside novelists — connected by shared ideas and recurring themes.
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"The thing I love about Dickens is the omniscient, omnipotent narrator, and the great confidence of the narrator, which marks 19th-century novelists in general and Dickens in particular."
"There's no way to know what makes one thing happen and not another. What leads to what. What destroys what. What causes what to flourish or die or take another course."
"the best often die by their own hand just to get away, and those left behind can never quite understand why anybody would ever want to get away from them"
"If you're a novelist, you have sort of themes that run throughout novels. You start a novel and you finish a novel. With record-making in the singer-songwriter world or whatever it is that I do, it's a little different because there is no specific arc that is necessarily, like it's not a concept record."
"When men abandon reason, physical force becomes their only means of dealing with one another and of settling disagreements."
"I loathe your ideals because I know no worse injustice than the giving of the undeserved."
"All your questions can be answered, if that is what you want. But once you learn your answers, you can never unlearn them."
"A novelist who ranks with Proust , Kafka , Musil and his friend James Joyce as one of the enduring pillars of Modernism."
"Never underestimate the Pricey."
"That is the dream of all novelists-that one of their characters will become 'somebody.'"
"The only true aristocracy is that of consciousness."
"I try very hard to be fair, and I look for ironies. In a way, I live on ironies as a novelist."
"You're a wizard, Harry."
"Sometimes I think some of my fellow novelists who have not worked in television and film are very naive about this process. They get an offer and there's the dump truck full of money and they sign it, they cash the check and then they're not involved in the series. They may get invited to the premiere and they come out of the premiere looking like all of their children had just been gassed, with a stunned look on their face because everything has been changed."
"I want you to be afraid to turn the page (and to do that) you need to show right from the beginning that you're playing for keeps."
"The great European novel started out as entertainment, and every true novelist is nostalgic for it. In fact, the themes of those great entertainments are terribly serious-think of Cervantes!"
"It is the function of the novelist to reveal the hidden life at its source: to tell us more about Queen Victoria than could be known, and thus to produce a character who is not the Queen Victoria of history."
"A novel is based on evidence, + or -x, the unknown quantity being the temperament of the novelist, and the unknown quantity always modifies the effect of the evidence, and sometimes transforms it entirely."
"The novel is a perfect medium for revealing to us the changing rainbow of our living relationships. The novel can help us to live,as nothing else can: no didactic Scripture, anyhow. If the novelist keeps his thumb out of the pan."
"I am a man and alive. For this reason I am a novelist. And, being a novelist, I consider myself superior to the saint, te scientist, the philosopher, and the poet, who are all great masters of different bits of man alive, but never get the whole hog....Only in the novel are all things given full play."
