Swallows and Amazons for-ever!.

Some changes are so slow, you don't notice them, others are so fast, they don't notice you..

If you act like a victim, you are likely to be treated as one..

It is not the office of a novelist to show us how to behave ourselves; it is not the business of fiction to teach us anything..

Be proud of your scars. They remind you that you have the will to live..

Not all novelists are power-hungry madman. Some are power-hungry madwomen..

We live in an age in which the imagination of the novelist is helpless against what he knows he is going to read in tomorrow's newspaper..

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 charac….

Although some people think I am a romantic novelist I have always thought of myself as a rather gritty radical historian..

The essay is a wonderful medium. I might mention that some writers who longed to be novelists were better as essayists: Sontag, Baldwin, Vidal, Mary ….

If you tell a novelist, 'Life's not like that', he has to do something about it. The poet simply replies, 'No, but I am.'.

Be born anywhere, little embryo novelist, but do not be born under the shadow of a great creed, not under the burden of original sin, not under the d….

Freud was just a novelist..

Two things a novelist can do with a hat: Talk through it or pull a rabbit from it..

Why should a novelist not also be a historian? To force unnatural divisions within the English language is to work against its capacious and accommod….

Let’s hope the institution of marriage survives its detractors, for without it there would be no more adultery and without adultery two thirds of our….

The biggest book for me, when I was fifteen, was Crime and Punishment, which I read in a kind of fever. When I put it down, I thought, if this is wha….

Mark Twain was a great traveler and he wrote three or four great travel books. I wouldn't say that I'm a travel novelist but rather a novelist who tr….

The art of fiction does not begin until the novelist thinks of his story as a matter to be shown, to be so exhibited that it will tell itself..

I have a wonderful editor who believes in fiction and poetry. She herself is a novelist and poet..

I don't like to read novels where the novelist tells me what to think about the situation and the characters. I prefer to discover for myself..