Best writing & novelists Quotes | Short & Famous Sayings

“People really want to believe that there is no fiction. I think they find it much easier to imagine that novelists are writing memoirs, writing about their lives, because it's difficult to conceive that there's a great imaginary life in which you can participate.”

People Thinking Want Writing Believe Difficult Fiction Imagine Easier Memoir Novelists Imaginary Imagine That Imaginary Life

Author:Mark Leyner

“To present a scientific subject in an attractive and stimulating manner is an artistic task, similar to that of a novelist or even a dramatic writer. The same holds for writing textbooks.”

Writing Book Science Subjects Tasks Artistic Novelists Attractive Dramatic Textbooks

Author:Max Born

“There are many reasons why novelists write, but they all have one thing in common - a need to create an alternative world.”

World Needs Writing Reason Common One Thing Alternatives Reason Why Novelists

Author:John Fowles

“For the first-time novelist you've got to get up at 5:30 in the morning and write until 7, make breakfast and go to work. Or, come home and work for an hour. Everybody has an hour in their day somewhere.”

Writing Firsts Home Hours Morning First Time Get Up Novelists Coming Home Breakfast

Author:Ridley Pearson

“I plot as I go. Many novelists write an outline that has almost as many pages as their ultimate book. Others knock out a brief synopsis... Do what is comfortable. If you have to plot out every move your characters make, so be it. Just make sure there is a plausible purpose behind their machinations. A good reader can smell a phony plot a block away.”

Ifs Writing Book Character Moving Purpose Behinds Reader Comfortable Pages Ultimate Smell Block Novelists Plot Outlines Phony Plausible Synopsis

Author:Clive Cussler

“Would-be novelists need to bring equal parts arrogance and ignorance to the task before them. The arrogance is almost self-explanatory. Walk into any bookstore or library, calculate how many lifetimes the average person would need to read all the fiction contained therein. To think that one has anything to contribute, to any genre or tradition, takes genuine hubris.”

Thinking Needs Writing Persons Self Would Be Walks Fiction Ignorance Equal Tradition Tasks Lifetime Library Average Genuine Genre Novelists Arrogance Bookstores Average Person Hubris

Author:Laura Lippman

“Nobody asks you to do this. The world out there is not panting after another novelist. We choose it”

World Writing Asks Novelists

Author:Paul Auster

“As a novelist, I mined my history, my family and my memory, but in a very specific way. Writing fiction, I never made use of experiences immediately as they happened. I needed to let things fester in my memory, mature and transmogrify into something meaningful.”

Way Writing Made Use Memories Fiction Happened Needed My Family Meaningful Novelists Mature Writing Fiction

Author:Ayelet Waldman

“Every genuinely literary style, from the high authorial voice to Foster Wallace and his footnotes-within-footnotes, requires the reader to see the world from somewhere in particular, or from many places. So every novelist's literary style is nothing less than an ethical strategy - it's always an attempt to get the reader to care about people who are not the same as he or she is.”

People World Writing Care Voice Style Particular Reader Strategy Novelists Ethical Footnotes Literary Style

Author:Zadie Smith

“The artist deals with what cannot be said in words. The novelist says in words what cannot be said in words.”

Writing Said Artist Deals Novelists

Book:High Tide in Tucson

Source: High Tide in Tucson

“When I was 30 or so - by that time I had become an assistant D.A. - I decided I would try to write a novel. To be clear: I did not decide to become a novelist. Honestly, it never crossed my mind that I could actually earn a living as a professional novelist.”

Writing Trying Mind Novel Clear Decided Honestly Novelists Assistants

Author:William Landay

“There are many ways of writing badly about painting... There is an 'appreciative' language of threadbare, not inaccurate, but overexposed and irritating words... the language of the schools which 'situates' works and artists in schools and movements... novelists and poets [that] see paintings as allegories of writing.”

Way Writing School Artist Language Movement Painting Poet Novelists Irritating Appreciative Allegory

Author:A. S. Byatt

“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.”

Writing New York Crafts Novelists New York Times Sixteen

Author:Robert Dugoni

“Today there are a lot of novelists who seem to be writing to be reviewed, not read.”

Writing Seems Today Novelists

Author:Pete Hamill

“I suspect there are two kinds of novelists. Those who have a point of view and have something to say and then write a novel in order to say that thing, and those of us who write the book in order to find out what we think about that thing.”

Thinking Writing Kind Two Book Order Views Novel Point Of View Novelists Suspects

Author:Neil Gaiman

“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.”

Ifs Thinking Way Feels Writing Wells Long Real Hard Found Space Novel Novelists Things To Do Desperate Symptoms Discouraged Hard Things

Author:Maxwell Perkins

“The preoccupation of the novelist: how to capture the living moments, was answered by the diary. You write while you are alive. You do not preserve them in alcohol until the moment you are ready to write about them.”

Writing Moments Alive Ready Alcohol Preserves Novelists Capture Live In The Moment Diaries Preoccupation

Author:Anais Nin

“I'm a novelist who read a lot as a kid. When you grow up on books and then grow up to write books, famous authors are a lot more meaningful to you than TV and movie stars.”

Writing Book Kids Stars Grows Growing Up Tvs Meaningful Novelists Movie Star

Author:Bill Vaughan

“There is a part of me in every character, naturally. That's why novelists rarely write good autobiographies. You start one and it becomes another novel.”

Writing Character Novel Novelists Autobiography

Book:John Dos Passos: the major nonfictional prose

Source: John Dos Passos: the major nonfictional prose

“The only excuse for a novelist, aside from the entertainment and vicarious living his books give the people who read them, is as a sort of second-class historian of the age he lives in. The "reality" he missed by writing about imaginary people, he gains by being able to build a reality more nearly out of his own factual experience than a plain historian or biographer can.”

People Giving Writing Book Reality Age Able Class Gains Entertainment Excuse Novelists Historian Imaginary Factual Biographers Vicarious

Book:John Dos Passos: the major nonfictional prose

Source: John Dos Passos: the major nonfictional prose

“Great novelists are philosopher novelists - that is, the contrary of thesis-writers.”

Writing Argument Philosopher Novelists

Author:Albert Camus

“Novelists are people who have discovered that they can dampen their neuroses by writing make-believe. We will keep on doing that no matter what, while offering loftier explanations.”

People Writing Believe Matter No Matter What Novelists Explanation Offering Neurosis Make Believe

Author:Kurt Vonnegut

“It's so easy to get into the same routine. A novel every two years; perhaps, improving technique. But I'm not interested in that. I'm interested in doing something fundamentally important--and therefore, it needs time. And what I've been doing, really, is avoiding this pressure to get into the habit of one novel a year. This is what is expected of novelists. And I have never been really too much concerned with doing what is expected of novelists, or writers, or artists. I want to do what I believe is important.”

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Writing Quotes