Whether you're an unpublished novelist or a sixteen-time New York Times bestselling author, you can always improve your craft. You can always become a better writer.
The job of the novelist is to invent: to embroider, to color, to embellish, to entertain, to make things up. The art of what I do lies not in research or even recollection but primarily in invention.
I hated being a novelist when I was 20 - I had nothing to write about.
I'm a novelist, I'm not an activist. I'm not a non-fiction writer, I'm not a journalist. I'm not a foodie, I'm not even really an animal person, or an environmentalist. I did the best I could with this, but it's not who I am.
I think, if you want to grow a novelist, for that person to have a lot of boring time trying to entertain themselves is very important.
Every novelist should write something for children at least once in his lifetime.
The point I would make is that the novelist and the historian are seeking the same thing: the truth – not a different truth: the same truth – only they reach it, or try to reach it, by different routes. Whether the event took place in a world now gone to dust, preserved by documents and evaluated by scholarship, or in the imagination, preserved by memory and distilled by the creative process, they both want to tell us how it was: to re-create it, by their separate methods, and make it live again in the world around them.
The painter paints, the musician makes music, the novelist writes novels. But I believe that we all have some influence, not because of the fact that one is an artist, but because we are citizens.
I think it's really boring, from the point of view of the novelist, to write about yourself. Tedious. But that's very hard to explain to people who really don't believe in the possibility of invention.
For me, as a beginning novelist, all other living writers form a control group for whom the world is a placebo.
Life is a very bad novelist. It is chaotic and ludicrous.
Henry James claim that if you want to be a novelist you should be somebody on whom nothing is lost.
I suppose I am a born novelist, for the things I imagine are more vital and vivid to me than the things I remember.
I realized that my identity as a novelist was private. Only I knew how much of a novelist I was!
As a novelist, there are three phone calls you never expect to receive in your lifetime because if you waited for them you would grow despairing - one calling from Stockholm with a Swedish accent, one from the NBA, and one from Oprah Winfrey.
It's almost a sort of fairy story tale, just what a novelist would write about a discovery.
I think of a designer as a processor of information — like a scriptwriter or a novelist.
I would never have been a novelist without working as a psychologist. . . it was a great education in human nature.
To be a novelist, all I need is a pen and a piece of paper.
God pity the poor novelist.