#novelist

With the marketing pressures driving the book world today, it's much easier to get the author of a memoir on a television show than a serious novelist. ↗

— David Halberstam

#book #driving #easier #get #marketing

I never see a novel as a film while I'm writing it. Mostly because novels and films are so different, and I'm such an internal novelist. ↗

— Alice Hoffman

#different #film #films #i #internal

It is the job of the novelist to touch the reader. ↗

— Elizabeth George

#novelist #reader #touch

I had thought of writing, actually, and that later on I'd be a novelist. ↗

— Francois Truffaut

#had #i #later #novelist #thought

They know a million tricks, those novelists. Take Doctor Goebbels; that's how he started out, writing fiction. Appeals to the base lusts that hide in everyone no matter how respectable on the surface. Yes, the novelist knows humanity, how worthless they are, ruled by their testicles, swayed by cowardice, selling out every cause because of their greed - all he's got to do is thump on the drum, and there's his response. And he's laughing, of course, behind his hand at the effect he gets. ↗

— Philip K. Dick

#novelists #writing #art

The novel should tell the truth, as I see the truth, or as the novelist persuades me to see it. And one more demand: I expect the novelist to aspire to improve the world. ... As a novelist, I want to be more than one more dog barking at the other dogs barking at me. Not out of any foolish hope that one novelist, or all virtuous novelists in chorus, can make much of a difference for good, except in the long run, but out of the need to prevent the human world from relaxing into something worse. To maintain the tension between truth and falsity, beauty and ugliness, good and evil. ... I believe the highest duty of the serious novelist is, whatever the means or technique, to be a critic of his society, to hold society to its own ideals, or if these ideals are unworthy, to suggest better ideals. ↗

— Edward Abbey

#society #truth #beauty

The pleasures of being a novelist are many.  But the greatest by far is the manner in which I live through my characters; experiencing every detail of their story as it unfolds gradually and personally within my own creative psyche.  I'm like a cat with untold lives, because each new book is my rebirth. ↗

— Richelle E. Goodrich

#enjoyment #novelist #pleasure #richelle #richelle-goodrich

Manners are of such great consequence to the novelist that any kind will do. Bad manners are better than no manners at all, and because we are losing our customary manners, we are probably overly conscious of them; this seems to be a condition that produces writers. ↗

— Flannery O'Connor

#bad #bad manners #because #better #condition

A couple years ago, the novelist Russell Banks told me he was reading the ancient Greek historian Herodotus. I asked why. He said, 'Because I've always wanted to and am tired of having my reading assigned.' I thought it was a marvelous declaration of independence. ↗

— Richard Russo

#always #am #ancient #asked #assigned

Among the many problems which beset the novelist, not the least weighty is the choice of the moment at which to begin his novel. ↗

— Vita Sackville-West

#begin #beset #choice #his #least