Explore Quotes on Novelists

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

Power doesn't have to show off. Power is confident, self-assuring, self-starting and self-stopping, self-warming and self-justifying. When you have it, you know it.

Love is just a word until someone comes along and gives it meaning.

Didn't they realize that the only way to change things was to act?

God could not be everywhere, and therefore he made mothers.

Being a novelist and being a mother have exactly coincided in my life: the call from my agent saying that I had a contract for my first novel - that was on my answering phone message when I got back from the hospital with my first child.

I know I'm a rare person, a trained scientist who writes fiction, because so few contemporary novelists engage with science.

Kingsley Amis was one of a trio of brilliant comic novelists who made English literature sparkle in the twentieth century.

Ever try to hold a butterfly? It can't be done. You damage them," he said. 'As gentle as you try to be, you take the powder from their wings and they won't ever fly the same. It's kinder to let them go.

If you love deeply, you're going to get hurt badly. But it's still worth it.

Do remember, though, that sometimes the people you oppress become mightier than you would like.

While the novelist is banging on his typewriter, the poet is watching a fly in the windowpane.

Since I became a novelist I have discovered that I am biased. Either I think a new novel is worse than mine and I don’t like it, or I suspect it is better than my novels and I don’t like it.

I sometimes seem to myself to wander around the world merely accumulating material for future nostalgias.

There is a great need for a sarcasm font.

If you're happy in a dream, does that count?

I didn't start running because somebody asked me to become a runner. Just like I didn't become a novelist because someone asked me to. One day, out of the blue, I wanted to write a novel. And one day, out of the blue, I started to run-simply because I wanted to. I've always done whatever I felt like doing in life. People may try to stop me, and convince me I'm wrong, but I won't change.

Everything I’ve ever let go of has claw marks on it.

Do not ask your children to strive for extraordinary lives. Such striving may seem admirable, but it is the way of foolishness. Help them instead to find the wonder and the marvel of an ordinary life. Show them the joy of tasting tomatoes, apples and pears. Show them how to cry when pets and people die. Show them the infinite pleasure in the touch of a hand. And make the ordinary come alive for them. The extraordinary will take care of itself.

I am, when you stop to think of it, a member of a fairly select group: the final handful of American novelists who learned to read and write before they learned to eat a daily helping of video bullshit.

Stories in which the destruction of society occurs are explorations of social fears and issues that filmmakers, novelists, playwrights, painters have been examining for a long time.