(27 quotes found)
“There are many reasons why novelists write, but they all have one thing in common - a need to create an alternative world.”
John Fowles
“The bicycle, the bicycle surely, should always be the vehicle of novelists and poets”
Christopher Morley
“They can't yank a novelist like they can a pitcher. A novelist has to go the full nine, even if it kills him.”
Ernest Hemingway
“Most contemporary novelists, especially the American and the French, are too subjective, mesmerized by private demons; they're enraptured by their navels and confined by a view that ends with their own toes.”
Truman Capote
“F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, and William Faulkner have fewer published novels combined than any number of contemporary novelists-Roberts, King, Koontz, Steel, etc.”
Nicholas Sparks
“The dominant and most deep-dyed trait of the journalist is his timorousness. Where the novelist fearlessly plunges into the water of self-exposure, the journalist stands trembling on the shore in his beach robe. The journalist confines himself to the clean, gentlemanly work of exposing the grieves and shames of others.”
Janet Malcolm
“[Perhaps this is a good thing. And potentially dangerous for a novelist. The dangers are obvious. A deadening earnestness and political self-awareness that do not meet the delight component that is a story's bottom line. Too much ideological hand-wringing. We've all sat through readings by authors whose politics we admire but whose prose cannot hold us. We are reminded of the definition of] camp ... a seriousness that fails.”
Susan Sontag
“With a novelist, like a surgeon, you have to get a feeling that you've fallen into good hands - someone from whom you can accept the anesthetic with confidence.”
Saul Bellow
“She was a wonderful poet, a good short-story writer and a fine novelist.”
Ray Bradbury
“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.”
Norman Mailer
