The next time the novelist rings the bell I will not stir though the meeting-house burn down.
The novelist's--any writer's--object is to whittle down his meaning to the exactest and finest possible point. What, of course, isfatal is when he does not know what he does mean: he has no point to sharpen.
Life is a very bad novelist. It is chaotic and ludicrous.
Once upon a time, novelists of the 19th century, such as Charles Dickens, published in serial form.
Is any novelist going to recognize the moment when he or she has nothing more to say? It is a brave thing to admit. And since as a professional writer you are full of anxiety anyway, you could easily misread the signs.
Novelists get to direct the perfect films. We get to cast every part. We dress the set exactly as we wish.
One connection I see between novelists and terrorists is that we both attempt to alter consciousness.
The novel is resilient, and so are novelists.
Some of what we read in classical literature is not relative to our condition, but then many women novelists and poets have turned it upside down and told the stories from the other point of view.
Unfortunately for novelists, real life is getting way too funny and far-fetched.
The true novelist is one who understands the work as a continuous poem, is a myth-maker, and the wonder of the art resides in the endless different ways of telling a story.
The bicycle, the bicycle surely, should always be the vehicle of novelists and poets.
The economy of a novelist is a little like that of a careful housewife who is unwilling to throw away anything that might perhaps serve its turn.
You could do math early, but there are no brilliant 16-year-old novelists. They don't know the human condition yet.
How can we expect novelists to be moral, when their trade forces them to treat every end they meet as no more than an imperfect means to a novel?
Henry James would have been vastly improved as a novelist by a few whiffs of the Chicago stockyard.
I thought I wanted to be a journalist or a novelist.
All novels are about crime. You'd be hard pressed to find any novel that does not have an element of crime. I don't see myself as a crime novelist, but there are crimes in my books. That's the nature of storytelling, if you want to reflect the real world.
Whether you're an unpublished novelist or a sixteen-time New York Times bestselling author, you can always improve your craft.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.
I have a wonderful editor who believes in fiction and poetry. She herself is a novelist and poet.