153 Quotes About Novelists

For the next fortnight Anne writhed or reveled, according to the mood, in her literary pursuits. Now she would be jubilant over a brilliant idea, now despairing because some contrary character would not behave properly. Diana could not understand this. 'Make them do as you want them to,' she said. 'I can't,' mourned Anne. 'Averil is such an unmanageable heroine. She will do and say things I never meant her to. Then that spoils everything that went before and I have to write it all over again.

I am certain that a novelist is someone who attributes a different reality-value to the characters and events of his story than to those of 'real' life. A novelist is someone who confuses his own life with that of his characters.

Novelists should never allow themselves to weary of the study of real life. If they observed this duty conscientiously, they would give us fewer pictures chequered with vivid contrasts of light and shade; they would seldom elevate their heroes and heroines to the heights of rapture — still seldomer sink them to the depths of despair; for if we rarely taste the fulness of joy in this life, we yet more rarely savour the acrid bitterness of hopeless anguish.

Novelists and police-inspectors do not always see eye to eye as regards publicity.

They are very large in effect, these painters; very little self-conscious; they have smooth broad spaces in their minds where I am all prickles & promontories.

So many novelists of our time eschew any “message,” as if it’s an aesthetic flaw. Maybe critics want to preserve our self-defeatingly clamorous culture by making sure no radical idea actually gets through and can be heard.

I write for those who desire, not publication at any cost, but publication one can be proud of--serious, honest fiction, the kind of novel that readers will find they enjoy reading more than once, the kind of fiction likely to survive.

To be psychologically suited for membership in what I have called the highest class of novelists, the writer must be not only capable of understanding people different from himself but fascinated by such people . . . and have sufficient self-esteem that he is not threatened by difference.

Not all novelists are power-hungry madman. Some are power-hungry madwomen.