Quotes on Novelists

A very important thing is not to make up your mind that you are any one thing.

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

The nation which once held the creed that greatness is achieved by production, is now told that it is achieved by squalor.

Fairy tales do not tell children the dragons exist. Children already know that dragons exist. Fairy tales tell children the dragons can be killed.

I thought I was your destination. Looks like I was just another stop on the line.

People have obsessions and fears and passions which they don't admit to. I think every character is interesting and has extremes. It's the novelist privilege to see how odd everyone is.

Memories do not always soften with time; some grow edges like knives.

Self-sacrifice? But it is precisely the self that cannot and must not be sacrificed.

I like novelists who can create other interesting worlds.

I loathe your ideals because I know no worse injustice than the giving of the undeserved.

She wasn't doing a thing that I could see, except standing there leaning on the balcony railing, holding the universe together.

We went down into the silent garden. Dawn is the time when nothing breathes, the hour of silence. Everything is transfixed, only the light moves.

An inventor is a man who asks 'Why?' of the universe and lets nothing stand between the answer and his mind.

Life is the flower for which love is the honey.

A novelist is a person who lives in other people's skins.

Had I not created my whole world, I would certainly have died in other people’s.

No man can be an exile if he remembers that all the world is one city.

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.

Margaret Atwood, the Canadian novelist, once asked a group of women at a university why they felt threatened by men. The women said they were afraid of being beaten, raped, or killed by men. She then asked a group of men why they felt threatened by women. They said they were afraid women would laugh at them.

If you hate a person, you hate something in him that is part of yourself. What isn't part of ourselves doesn't disturb us.

It seems priggish or pollyannaish to deny that my intention in writing the work was to titillate the nastier propensities of my readers. My own healthy inheritance of original sin comes out in the book and I enjoyed raping and ripping by proxy. It is the novelist’s innate cowardice that makes him depute to imaginary personalities the sins that he is too cautious to commit for himself.