139 Quotes About Novelist

Reading is rapture (or if it isn't, I put the book down meaning to go on with it later, and escape out the side door).

One has to be just a little crazy to write a great novel.One must be capable of allowing the darkest, most ancient and shrewd parts of one's being to take over the work from time to time. Or be capable of cracking the door now and then tothe deep craziness of life itself—as when in Anna Karenina, Levin proposes to Kitty in the same weird way Tolstoy himself proposed to his wife. Strangeness is the one quality in fiction that cannot be faked.

Nothing is sillier than the creative writing teacher's dictum"Write about what you know." But whether you're writingabout people or dragons, your personal observation of howthings happen in the world—how character reveals itself—canturn a dead scene into a vital one. Preliminary good advicemight be: Write as if you were a movie camera. Get exactlywhat is there. All human beings see with astonishing accuracy,not that they can necessarily write it down.

The question one asks of the young writer who wants toknow if he's got what it takes is this: "Is writing novels whatyou want to do? Really want to do?"If the young writer answers, "Yes," then all one can say is:Do it. In fact, he will anyway.

He looks like a man.' 'How descriptive,' Susan said in a droll tone. 'Remind me never to advise you to seek work as a novelist.

A novelist should not be too intelligent either, although. . . he may be permitted to be an intellectual.

I didn't have a dream of being a press secretary, I had a dream of being a playwright; I had a dream of being a novelist and a poet.

Let me put it this way: I don't plan to retire. What would I do, become a brain surgeon? I mean, a brain surgeon can retire and write novels, but a novelist can't retire and do brain surgery - or at least he better not.

After writing a novel, what is there to say? If a novelist could say it in a maxim, they wouldn't need 120,000 words, several years and sundry characters, plots and subplots, and so on. I'd much rather listen always.