#novelist

What description of clouds and sunsets was to the old novelist, description of scientific apparatus and methods is to the modern Scientific Detective writer. ↗

— Hugo Gernsback

#clouds #description #detective #methods #modern

For me, as a beginning novelist, all other living writers form a control group for whom the world is a placebo. ↗

— Nicholson Baker

#control #form #group #living #me

Let's put it this way: if you are a novelist, I think you start out with a 20 word idea, and you work at it and you wind up with a 200,000 word novel. We, picture-book people, or at least I, start out with 200,000 words and I reduce it to 20. ↗

— Eric Carle

#i #i think #idea #least #novel

After I convinced them that I was a harmless novelist, I actually got them to give me a tour of the harem - which is usually off limits for tourists. ↗

— Dorothy Dunnett

#after #convinced #give #give me #got

A filmmaker has almost the same freedom as a novelist has when he buys himself some paper. ↗

— Stanley Kubrick

#buys #filmmaker #freedom #himself #novelist

The bicycle, the bicycle surely, should always be the vehicle of novelists and poets. ↗

— Christopher Morley

#bicycle #novelists #poets #should #surely

In fact I don't think of literature, or music, or any art form as having a nationality. Where you're born is simply an accident of fate. I don't see why I shouldn't be more interested in say, Dickens, than in an author from Barcelona simply because I wasn't born in the UK. I do not have an ethno-centric view of things, much less of literature. Books hold no passports. There's only one true literary tradition: the human. ↗

— Carlos Ruiz Zafón

#european-novelists #literary-tradition #literature-in-translation #art

The function of the novelist... is to comment upon life as he sees it. ↗

— Frank Norris

#function #life #novelist #sees #upon

Who is better off? The one who writes to revel in the voluptuousness of the life that surrounds them? Or the one who writes to escape the tediousness of that which awaits them outside? Whose flame will last longer? ↗

— Roman Payne

#books #escape #flame #heroic #heroism

A playwright must be his own audience. A novelist may lose his readers for a few pages; a playwright never dares lose his audience for a minute. ↗

— Terence Rattigan

#dares #few #his #lose #may