139 Quotes About Novelist

A friend worth knowing tolerates your flaws while a friend worth keeping loves you in spite of them.

I think', said Sally, 'it must be marvellous to be a novelist. You're frightfully dreamy and unpractical and unbusinesslike, and people imagine they can fairly swindle you as much as they want - and then you sit down and write a book about them which fairly shows them what swine they all are, and it's the most terrific success and you make pots of money.

So much of a novelist’s writing … takes place in the unconscious: in those depths the last word is written before the word appears on paper. We remember the details of our story, we do not invent them.

Sometimes I don't even know why I'm writing what I'm writing...I'm just following these people around and taking notes.

You write once and you can call yourself a writer, but it takes three novels before you can call yourself a novelist. The first two could have just been lucky. One day, I will finish my third, and one day, I will be a novelist.

It is possible to be a great novelist - that is, to render a veracious account of your times - and a bad writer - that is, an incompetent practitioner of applied linguistics.

I remember calling the council's cemetery department to ask about body decomposition in different soil types. Once they had verified that I was a novelist and not a sicko, they were extremely helpful.

Being a novelist is not the sort of thing we can shut off. It infests every bit of us until we lose the boundary between Person and Writer, like one of those color charts where it is impossible to say where the blue stops and the red begins.

I think that at the bottom of all art lies the impulse to preserve.