Quotes on Novelists

I believe, in a funny way, the job of the novelist is to be out there on the fringes and speaking for an experience that has not really been spoken for.

The difficulty of saying I-a phrase from the East German novelist Christa Wolf. But once having said it, as we realize the necessity to go further, isn't there a difficulty of saying 'we'? You cannot speak for me. I cannot speak for you. Two thoughts: there is no liberation that only knows how to say 'I'; there is no collective movement that speaks for each of us all the way through.

The novelist's ambition is not to do something better than his predecessors but to see what they did not see, say what they did not say.

A novelist is, like all mortals, more fully at home on the surface of the present than in the ooze of the past.

I am worrying about my country. I feel I have a responsibility as a novelist to do something.

Novels are fictions and therefore they tell lies, but through those lies every novelist attempts to tell the truth about the world.

The novelist does not long to see the_x000D_ lion eat grass. He realizes that one and_x000D_ the same God created the wolf and the_x000D_ lamb, then smiled, “seeing that his_x000D_ work was good.”

I don’t think ‘science fiction’ is a very good name for it, but it’s the name that we’ve got. It is different from other kinds of writing, I suppose, so it deserves a name of its own. But where I can get prickly and combative is, if I’m just called a sci-fi writer. I’m not. I’m a novelist and poet. Don’t shove me into your damn pigeonhole, where I don’t fit, because I’m all over. My tentacles are coming out of the pigeonhole in all directions.

Whoever claims the right to redistribute the wealth produced by others is claiming the right to treat human beings as chattel.

I have been born more times than anybody except Krishna.

The ancient historians gave us delightful fiction in the form of fact; the modern novelist presents us with dull facts under the guise of fiction.

There is only one expert who is qualified to examine the souls and the life of a people and make a valuable report - the native novelist. ... And when a thousand able novels have been written, there you have the soul of the people; and not anywhere else can these be had.

Talents of the novelist: ... observation of character, analysis of emotion, people's feelings, personal relations.

I don't know who said that novelists read the novels of others only to figure out how they are written. I believe it's true. We aren't satisfied with the secrets exposed on the surface of the page: we turn the book around to find the seams.

If a person is not talented enough to be a novelist, not smart enough to be a lawyer, and his hands are too shaky to perform operations, he becomes a journalist.

An honest man is one who knows that he can't consume more than he has produced.

Every moment is a new beginning.

Novelist-Citizen of Two Countries Interpreter of his Generation on both Sides of the Sea.

Anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job.

Expansion, that is the idea the novelist must cling to, not completion, not rounding off, but opening out.

Friendship is unnecessary, like philosophy, like art... It has no survival value; rather it is one of those things that give value to survival.