There seems almost a general wish of descrying the capacity and undervaluing the labour of the novelist, and of slighting the performances which have only genius, wit, and taste to recommend them.
Horror writers can write about everything in the real world that a mainstream novelist can--plus the supernatural, which is the most fertile field for metaphor imaginable.
Whether he be an original or a plagiarist, man is the novelist of himself.
If you tell a novelist, 'Life's not like that', he has to do something about it. The poet simply replies, 'No, but I am. '
I am a better novelist than a poet, playwright, or essayist.
I started writing short fiction very briefly, as I imagine is the case for some novelists.
The writer - more especially the novelist - who has not, at one moment or another, considered his publisher unworthy of him, has still to be conceived.
Not all popular novelists are good, but all good novelists are, sooner or later, popular.
The novelist works neither to correct nor to condone, not at all to comfort, but to make what's told alive.
Everything in the world began with a yes. One molecule said yes to another molecule and life was born.
Writing a novel is a very hard thing to do because it covers so long a space of time, and if you get discouraged it is not a bad sign, but a good one. If you think you are not doing it well, you are thinking the way real novelists do. I never knew one who did not feel greatly discouraged at times, and some get desperate, and I have always found that to be a good symptom.
The object of the novelist is to keep the reader entirely oblivious of the fact that the author exists - even of the fact he is reading a book.
the best often die by their own hand just to get away, and those left behind can never quite understand why anybody would ever want to get away from them
The business of a novelist is, in my opinion, to create characters first and foremost, and then to set them in the snarl of the human currents of his time, so that there results an accurate permanent record of a phase of history.
To ask a novelist to talk about his novels is like asking somebody to cook about their dancing.
Every novelist should possess a hermaphroditic imagination.
All good novelists have bad memories.
Unfortunately for novelists, real life is getting way too funny and far-fetched.
Novelists have always had complete freedom to pretty much tell their story any way they saw fit. And that's what I'm trying to do.
As a novelist you have just unlimited budget, total creative control. You really get to have your cake - all the cake - and then you can have a second cake if you wanted to.