Explore Quotes on Novelists

You'd be amazed how much research you can get done when you have no life whatsoever.

What happens when you let an unsatisfactory present go on long enough? It becomes your entire history.

Of course I'm trying to trick you! That's the way of the world, Baudelaires. Everyone runs around with their secrets and their schemes, trying to outwit everyone else.

Besties before testes.

I envied women with signature hair-dos, signature perfumes, signature sign-offs. Novelists who tell Vogue Magazine: “I can’t live without my Smythson notebook, Pomegranate Noir cologne by Jo Malone and Frette sheets”. In the grip of madness, materialism begins to look like an admirable belief system.

You must learn to be strong in the dark as well as in the day, else you will always be only half brave.

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

Cosmic time is the same for everyone, but human time differs with each person. Time flows in the same way for all human beings; every human being flows through time in a different way.

It is true that novelists are shameless and obey no decent law, and they are not to be trusted on any account, but some Mysteries even they must honor.

Advice is what we ask for when we already know the answer but wish we didn't.

Perhaps it is how we are made; perhaps words of truth reach us best through the heart, and stories and songs are the language of the heart

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

Sometimes seeing everything just gets in the way.

When we first met, I didn't want to get involved with anyone. I didn't have the time or energy, and I wasn't sure that I was ready for it. But you were so good to me, and I got swept up in that. And little by little, I found myself falling in love with you.

I hated being a novelist when I was 20 - I had nothing to write about.

I am not an academic who happens to have written a novel. I am a novelist who happens to be quite good academically.

He didn't want her; he wanted me. Well, you know how it is." Dalgliesh did know. This, after all, was the commonest, the most banal of personal tragedies. You loved someone. They didn't love you. Worse still, in defiance of their own best interests and to the destruction of your peace, they loved another. What would half the world's poets and novelists do without this universal tragicomedy?

I do not seek the good of others as a sanction for my right to exist, nor do I recognize the good of others as a justification for their seizure of my property or their destruction of my life.

My only passions were books and music. As you might guess, I led a lonely life… Not that I knew what I wanted in life - I didn’t. I loved reading novels to distraction, but didn’t write well enough to be a novelist; being an editor or a critic was out, too, since my tastes ran to the extremes. Novels should be for pure personal enjoyment, I decided, not part of your work or study. That’s why I didn’t study literature

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

There will be a few times in your life when all your instincts will tell you to do something, something that defies logic, upsets your plans, and may seem crazy to others. When that happens, you do it. Listen to your instincts and ignore everything else. Ignore logic, ignore the odds, ignore the complications, and just go for it.