Quotes on Novelists

Baby, we have no choice of what color we're born or who our parents are or whether we're rich or poor. What we do have is some choice over what we make of our lives once we're here.

Don't give to anyone the power to put you down. Haters are losers pretending to be winners.

You need three things to become a successful novelist: talent, luck and discipline. Discipline is the one element of those three things that you can control, and so that is the one that you have to focus on controlling, and you just have to hope and trust in the other two.

A mother's arms are made of tenderness and children sleep soundly in them.

There's a curious knot that binds novelists and terrorists...Years ago I used to think it was possible for a novelist to alter the inner life of the culture. Now bomb-makers and gunmen have taken that territory. They make raids on human consciousness. What writers used to do before we were all incorporated.

You deserve all the good things that happen to you. Don't feel guilty and accept the blessings.

Never say goodbye because goodbye means going away and going away means forgetting.

Nobody has ever measured, not even poets, how much the heart can hold.

Keep love in your heart. A life without it is like a sunless garden when the flowers are dead.

When men abandon reason, physical force becomes their only means of dealing with one another and of settling disagreements.

Fairy tales are more than true: not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us that dragons can be beaten.

I don't know half of you half as well as I should like; and I like less than half of you half as well as you deserve.

"Between a high, solid wall and an egg that breaks against it, I will always stand on the side of the egg."_x000D_ _x000D_ Yes, no matter how right the wall may be and how wrong the egg, I will stand with the egg. Someone else will have to decide what is right and what is wrong; perhaps time or history will decide. If there were a novelist who, for whatever reason, wrote works standing with the wall, of what value would such works be?

If you only write when inspired, you may be a fairly decent poet, but you'll never be a novelist.

If you are lonely when you're alone, you are in bad company.

Life will break you. Nobody can protect you from that, and living alone won't either, for solitude will also break you with its yearning. You have to love. You have to feel. It is the reason you are here on earth. You are here to risk your heart.

When I was ten, I read fairy tales in secret and would have been ashamed if I had been found doing so. Now that I am fifty, I read them openly. When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up.

A novelist who writes nothing for 10 years finds his reputation rising. Because I keep on producing books they say there must be something wrong with this fellow.

I will tell you something about stories . . . They aren't just entertainment. Don't be fooled. They are all we have, you see, all we have to fight off illness and death.

I met, not long ago, a young man who aspired to become a novelist. Knowing that I was in the profession, he asked me to tell him how he should set to work to realize his ambition. I did my best to explain. 'The first thing,' I said, 'is to buy quite a lot of paper, a bottle of ink, and a pen. After that you merely have to write.'

You don't have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them.