No matter how little a man has he will find that he will always settle for less.
Dreams cannot be tamed. Dreamers cannot be ruled.
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.
Shyness is a curious thing, because, like quicksand, it can strike people at any time, and also, like quicksand, it usually makes its victims look down.
He looks like a man. ' 'How descriptive,' Susan said in a droll tone. 'Remind me never to advise you to seek work as a novelist.
I'm a novelist, that's how I make my livelihood, and I concentrate on the novels.
Personally, I have never wished I were a male novelist.
Universities are filled with poets and novelists conducting demure and careful lives in imitation of Eliot and Forster and those others who (through what seems to be have been discretion) made it.
I couldn't be a novelist for instance. It feels like a very lonely endeavor. I don't know that I could survive the solitude of that.
We are mere journeymen, planting seeds for someone else to harvest.
A novelist must know what his last chapter is going to say and one way or another work toward that last chapter. . . . To me it is utterly basic, yet it seems like it's a great secret.
Every novelist has a different purpose-and often several purposes which might even be contradictory.
I was given a dictionary when I was seven, and I read it because I had nothing else to read. I read it the way you read a book.
Everything written, if it has anything in it, will offend someone, and if the mere taking of offence was to amount to a licence to kill the offender, well the world would be sadly underpopulated of novelists, columnists, bloggers, and the writers of editorials.
A novelist needs to know his own strong points and weak points.
Well I'm not a novelist. I've only written one book and that is a memoir.
The best moments involve a loss of control. It's a kind of rapture, and it can happen with words and phrases fairly often - completely surprising combinations that make a higher kind of sense, that come to you out of nowhere. But rarely for extended periods, for paragraphs and pages - I think poets must have more access to this state than novelists do.
I recognize myself to be an intensely naive person. Most novelists are, despite frequent pretensions to deep socio-political insight.
Unfortunately for novelists, real life is getting way too funny and far-fetched.
I am a cage, in search of a bird.