#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 a novelist, I have a somewhat higher soapbox to stand on than most people do when it comes to talking back to the merchants of fear. ↗

— L. Neil Smith

#comes #fear #higher #i #merchants

I don't like to read novels where the novelist tells me what to think about the situation and the characters. I prefer to discover for myself. ↗

— Frederick Wiseman

#characters #discover #i #like #me

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

The lady who works in the grocery store at the corner of my block is called Denise, and she's one of America's great unpublished novelists. Over the years she's written forty-two romantic novels, none of which have ever reached the bookstores. I, however, have been fortunate enough to hear the plots of the last twenty-seven of these recounted in installments by the authoress herself every time I drop by the store for a jar of coffee or can of beans, and my respect for Denise's literary prowess knows no bounds. So, naturally enough, when I found myself faced with the daunting task of actually starting the book you now hold in your hands, it was Denise I turned to for advice. ↗

— Dave Gibbons

#books #novelist #watchmen #writing #nature

Military people never seem to apologize for killing each other yet novelists feel ashamed for writing some nice inert paper book that is not certain to be read by anybody. ↗

— Leonora Carrington

#military #novelists #writing #military

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

Both the historian and the novelist view history as the struggle of a tiny minority, able and determined to make judgments, which is up against a vast and densely packed majority of the blind, who are led by their instincts and unable to think for themselves. ↗

— Lion Feuchtwanger

#against #blind #both #determined #historian