Novelist Quotes

“Nothing travels faster than the speed of light, with the possible exception of bad news, which obeys its own special laws.”
― Douglas Adams, Mostly Harmless

“Reading poetry is like undressing before a bath. You don't undress out of fear that your clothes will become wet. You undress because you want the water to touch you. You want to completely immerse yourself in the feeling of the water and to emerge anew.”
― Kamand Kojouri

“Who is better off? The one who writes to revel in the voluptuousness of the life that surrounds them? Or the one who writes to escape the tediousness of that which awaits them outside? Whose flame will last longer?”
― Roman Payne

“Poetry isn’t an island, it is the bridge.
Poetry isn’t a ship, it is the lifeboat.
Poetry isn’t swimming. Poetry is water.”
― Kamand Kojouri

“You sound so miserable.”

“All novelists are.”
― Changdictator

“If your not annoying somebody, you're not alive.”
― Margaret Atwood

“Rich will be my life if I
can keep my memories full
and brimming, and record
them on clear-eyed
mornings while I set
joyously to work setting
pen to holy craft.”
― Roman Payne, Rooftop Soliloquy

“To make an exceptional living with a career as a writer, you need multiple sources of writing income to sustain lifelong earnings. Never depend on only one origin of income as a novelist.”
― Chris Mentillo

“The real novelist, the perfectly simple human being, could go on, indefinitely imaging. ”
― Virginia Woolf, The Waves

“If you hear voices, you’re a lunatic. If you write down what they say, you’re an author.”
― Dani Harper

“I ran across an excerpt today (in English translation) of some dialogue/narration from the modern popular writer, Paulo Coelho in his book: Aleph.(Note: bracketed text is mine.)... 'I spoke to three scholars,' [the character says 'at last.'] ...two of them said that, after death, the [sic (misprint, fault of the publisher)] just go to Paradise. The third one, though, told me to consult some verses from the Koran. [end quote]' ...I can see that he's excited. [narrator]' ...Now I have many positive things to say about Coelho: He is respectable, inspiring as a man, a truth-seeker, and an appealing writer; but one should hesitate to call him a 'literary' writer based on this quote. A 'literary' author knows that a character's excitement should be 'shown' in his or her dialogue and not in the narrator's commentary on it. Advice for Coelho: Remove the 'I can see that he's excited' sentence and show his excitement in the phrasing of his quote.(Now, in defense of Coelho, I am firmly of the opinion, having myself written plenty of prose that is flawed, that a novelist should be forgiven for slipping here and there.)Lastly, it appears that a belief in reincarnation is of great interest to Mr. Coelho ... Just think! He is a man who has achieved, (as Leonard Cohen would call it), 'a remote human possibility.' He has won lots of fame and tons of money. And yet, how his preoccupation with reincarnation—none other than an interest in being born again as somebody else—suggests that he is not happy!”
― Roman Payne

“I only wrote prose before I met you.
My musings were superfluous and serious as well.
But now the words dance with me.
I sing with them
and we create poetry.”
― Kamand Kojouri

“You do not learn how to write novels in a writing program. You learn how by leading an interesting life. Open yourself up to all experience. Let life pour through you the way light pours through leaves.”
― Pat Conroy, My Losing Season: A Memoir

“The novelist works neither to correct nor to condone, not at all to comfort, but to make what's told alive.”
― Eudora Welty, On Writing

“The difference between a novelist and someone who tinkers around with writing is this: novelists finish their books.”
― Nancy Etchemendy

“A novelist is an elephant, but an elephant who must pretend to forget.”
― Mary McCarthy

“Mathias shrugged. After all, a criminal lawyer is not concerned with facts. He is concerned with probabilities. It is the novelist who is concerned with facts, whose job it is to say what a particular man did do on a particular occasion: the lawyer does not, cannot be expected to go further than show what the ordinary man would be most likely to do under presumed circumstances.”
― Richard Hughes, A High Wind in Jamaica

“Now that I was a novelist, I could not face the ignominy of failing to produce novels.”
― Thomas Keneally, Searching for Schindler: A Memoir

“I wish people would think of me as a musician who writes novels, instead of a novelist who writes music on the side.”
― Anthony Burgess

“The novel should tell the truth, as I see the truth, or as the novelist persuades me to see it. And one more demand: I expect the novelist to aspire to improve the world. ... As a novelist, I want to be more than one more dog barking at the other dogs barking at me. Not out of any foolish hope that one novelist, or all virtuous novelists in chorus, can make much of a difference for good, except in the long run, but out of the need to prevent the human world from relaxing into something worse. To maintain the tension between truth and falsity, beauty and ugliness, good and evil. ... I believe the highest duty of the serious novelist is, whatever the means or technique, to be a critic of his society, to hold society to its own ideals, or if these ideals are unworthy, to suggest better ideals.”
― Edward Abbey, Postcards from Ed: Dispatches and Salvos from an American Iconoclast

“A friend worth knowing tolerates your flaws while a friend worth keeping loves you in spite of them.”
― Kathy Reinhart

“The novelist now usurps the chair of the educator, the pulpit of the preacher, the columns of the journalist. Yet his original purpose of entertaining may have been his highest purpose. (introduction to Gladiator, Book League Monthly, 1930)”
― Philip Wylie

“I counted my years and found that I have less time to live from here on than I have lived up to now.
I feel like that child who won a packet of sweets: he ate the first with pleasure, but when he realized that there were few left, he began to enjoy them intensely.
I no longer have time for endless meetings where statutes, rules, procedures and internal regulations are discussed, knowing that nothing will be achieved.
I no longer have time to support the absurd people who, despite their chronological age, haven't grown up.
My time is too short:
I want the essence,
my soul is in a hurry.
I don't have many sweets
in the package anymore.
I want to live next to human people,
very human,
who know how to laugh at their mistakes,
and who are not inflated by their triumphs,
and who take on their responsibilities.
Thus, human dignity is defended, and we move towards truth and honesty.
It is the essential that makes life worth living.
I want to surround myself with people who know how to touch hearts, people who have been taught by the hard blows of life to grow with gentle touches of the soul.
Yes, I'm in a hurry, I'm in a hurry to live with the intensity that only maturity can give.
I don't intend to waste any of the leftover sweets.
I am sure they will be delicious, much more than what I have eaten so far.
My goal is to reach the end satisfied
and at peace with my loved ones
and my conscience.
We have two lives.
And the second begins when you realize you only have one.
Credits: Mário Raul de Morais Andrade
(Oct 9, 1893 – Feb 25, 1945)
Brazilian poet, novelist, musicologist, art historian and critic, photographer”
― Mario Raul de Morais Andrade

“Novelists don't normally write about what's going on; they write about what's not going on.”
― Martin Amis, The Second Plane: September 11, 2001-2007

“Novelist: Telling lies for fun and profit.”
― Marilyn Celeste Morris

“There are two types of writers, those who live to write and those who write to live.”
― Jack Freestone

“We often dwell on the past or imagine the future, but what truly matters is what we are experiencing right now. Everything else has already passed.”
― Chris Mentillo

“The novelist does not long to see the lion eat grass. He realizes that one and the same God created the wolf and the lamb, then smiled, "seeing that his work was good.”
― André Gide

“The less I needed the better I felt.”
― Charles Bukowski

“Hold fast to dreams, for if dreams die, life is a broken-winged bird who cannot fly.”
― Langston Hughes