#novelist

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

As it is I'm a dated novelist, whom hardly anybody reads, or if they do, most of them don't understand what I am on about. Certainly I wish I had never written Voss, which is going to be everybody's albatross. ↗

— Patrick White

#novelists #novels #voss-novel #dating

Like most novelists, I like to do exactly the opposite of what I'm told. It's in my nature as a novelist. Novelists can't trust anything they haven't seen with their own eyes or touched with their own hands. (Jerusalem Prize acceptance speech, JERUSALEM POST, Feb. 15, 2009) ↗

— Haruki Murakami

#truth #writers #writing #nature

Stories in which the destruction of society occurs are explorations of social fears and issues that filmmakers, novelists, playwrights, painters have been examining for a long time. ↗

— J. J. Abrams

#destruction #examining #fears #filmmakers #issues

With a novelist, like a surgeon, you have to get a feeling that you've fallen into good hands - someone from whom you can accept the anesthetic with confidence. ↗

— Saul Bellow

#anesthetic #confidence #fallen #feeling #get

Things were easier for the old novelists who saw people all of a piece. Speaking generally, their heroes were good through and through, their villains wholly bad. ↗

— W. Somerset Maugham

#easier #generally #good #heroes #novelists

I cannot and do not live in the world of discretion, not as a writer, anyway. I would prefer to, I assure you - it would make life easier. But discretion is, unfortunately, not for novelists. ↗

— Philip Roth

#assure #cannot #discretion #easier #i

In effect I am not a novelist, but rather a failed essayist who started to write novels because he didn't know how to write essays. ↗

— Jose Saramago

#because #effect #essayist #essays #failed

You do not learn how to write novels in a writing program. You learn how by leading an interesting life. Open yourself up to all experience. Let life pour through you the way light pours through leaves. ↗

— Pat Conroy

#novelist #write #writer #experience

There's a unique bond of trust between readers and authors that I don't believe exists in any other art form; as a reader, I trust a novelist to give me his or her best effort, however flawed. ↗

— Dan Simmons

#art #art form #authors #believe #best