Quotes on Novelists

They wrote in the old days that it is sweet and fitting to die for one's country. But in modern war, there is nothing sweet nor fitting in your dying. You will die like a dog for no good reason.

Happy is the novelist who manages to preserve an actual love letter that he received when he was young within a work of fiction, embedded in it like a clean bullet in flabby flesh and quite secure there, among spurious lives.

The one thing that doesn't abide by majority rule is a person's conscience.

RICE-WATER, n. A mystic beverage secretly used by our most popular novelists and poets to regulate the imagination and narcotize the conscience.

It's so hard to forget pain, but it's even harder to remember sweetness. We have no scar to show for happiness. We learn so little from peace.

Beware; for I am fearless, and therefore powerful.

The novel, for me, was an accident. I really don't consider myself a novelist.

Some day, the world will discover that, without thought, there can be no love.

With the marketing pressures driving the book world today, it's much easier to get the author of a memoir on a television show than a serious novelist.

I want you to be afraid to turn the page (and to do that) you need to show right from the beginning that you're playing for keeps.

Is any novelist going to recognize the moment when he or she has nothing more to say? It is a brave thing to admit. And since as a professional writer you are full of anxiety anyway, you could easily misread the signs.

To be true to life, a novel must have an ending that is inevitable given the specific personalities of the characters involved. The novelist must not impose an ending upon them.

Like every novelist, I fantasise about film. Novelists are not equipped to make a movie, in my opinion. They make their own movie when they write: they're casting, they're dressing the scene, they're working out where the energy of the scene is coming from, and they're also relying tremendously on the creative imagination of the reader.

Nobody realizes that some people expend tremendous energy merely to be normal.

Keep away from people who try to belittle your ambitions. Small people always do that, but the really great make you feel that you, too, can become great.

I wonder how many people I've looked at all my life and never seen.

You can give without loving, but you can never love without giving.

America's founding Ideal was the principle of individual rights. Nothing more - and nothing less.

I would never be part of anything. I would never really belong anywhere, and I knew it, and all my life would be the same, trying to belong, and failing. Always something would go wrong. I am a stranger and I always will be, and after all I didn’t really care.

There is a crack in everything, that's how the light gets in.

The most common way people give up their power is by thinking they don't have any.