Quotes on Novelists

Readers no longer need novelists to tell us what it's like to cross the world on a ship or fight a war. In the twenty-first century, we get that information in other ways. The thing that's still a mystery to us is the human heart. What we want is to understand people, what they're doing, and why they're doing it.

There are two ways of spreading light: to be the candle or the mirror that reflects it.

It's the duty of all novelists, all painters, all musicians, all people who try to make art move: to look for something they feel authentically, without paying attention to styles.

Novelists lie for a living - what is a novel, after all, but an assembly of fibs paradoxically meant to illustrate something true? - but generally see a distinction between lying on the page and lying off it.

Novelists are in the business of constructing consciousness out of words, and that's what we all do, cradle to grave. The self is a story we tell.

Sometimes we reveal ourselves when we are least like ourselves.

Southerners make good novelists: they have so many stories because they have so much family.

It's so much darker when a light goes out than it would have been if it had never shone.

Money is like manure; it's not worth a thing unless it's spread around encouraging young things to grow.

There are far, far better things ahead than any we leave behind.

I was once a graduate student in Victorian literature, and I believe as the Victorian novelists did, that a novel isn't simply a vehicle for private expression, but that it also exists for social examination. I firmly believe this.

A good friend will always stab you in the front.

The Catholic novelist in the South will see many distorted images of Christ, but he will certainly feel that a distorted image of Christ is better than no image at all. I think he will feel a good deal more kinship with backwoods prophets and shouting fundamentalists than he will with those politer elements for whom the supernatural is an embarrassment and for whom religion has become a department of sociology or culture or personality development.

To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all.

Writing tends to be very deliberate. A novelist could probably run a military campaign with some success. They could certainly run a country.

The excursion is the same when you go looking for your sorrow as when you go looking for your joy.

My greatest fear is feeling like a professional novelist. Somebody who creates characters, who sits down and has pieces of paper taped to the wall - what's going to happen in this scene, or this act. What I like is for it to be a much more scary, sloppy reflection of who I am.

An artist is a man who says a difficult thing in a simple way

There is something so deeply visceral about libraries for me-rooms and rooms full of people dreaming and remembering.

A petty reason perhaps why novelists more and more try to keep a distance from journalists is that novelists are trying to write the truth and journalists are trying to write fiction.

I was about half in love with her by the time we sat down. That's the thing about girls. Every time they do something pretty... you fall half in love with them, and then you never know where the hell you are.