#novelist

The fact is that in this day and age I don't think any novelist can assume that a book will get attention. ↗

— Curtis Sittenfeld

#any #assume #attention #book #day

The materials of the novelist must be real; they must be gathered from the field of humanity by his actual observation. ↗

— Goldwin Smith

#be real #field #gathered #his #humanity

The novelist must ground his work in faithful study of human nature. ↗

— Goldwin Smith

#ground #his #human #human nature #must

The novelist must look on humanity without partiality or prejudice. His sympathy, like that of the historian, must be unbounded, and untainted by sect or party. ↗

— Goldwin Smith

#historian #humanity #like #look #must

Mark Twain was a great traveler and he wrote three or four great travel books. I wouldn't say that I'm a travel novelist but rather a novelist who travels - and who uses travel as a background for finding stories of places. ↗

— Paul Theroux

#books #finding #four #great #i

The suspense of a novel is not only in the reader, but in the novelist, who is intensely curious about what will happen to the hero. ↗

— Mary McCarthy

#curious #happen #hero #intensely #novel

Sigmund Freud was a novelist with a scientific background. He just didn’t know he was a novelist. All those damn psychiatrists after him, they didn’t know he was a novelist either." (Interview in Writers at Work: The Paris Review Interviews, Eighth Series, ed. George Plimpton, 1988) ↗

— John Irving

#novelists #psychiatrists #science #sigmund-freud #science

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

Everyone assumes that novelists are smarter and more interesting. They're generally smarter and more interesting, but they're often very short. So it kind of cancels all the smart and interesting stuff out. ↗

— Liev Schreiber

#everyone #generally #interesting #interesting stuff #kind

Short-story writing requires an exquisite sense of balance. Novelists, frankly, can get away with more. A novel can have a dull spot or two, because the reader has made a different commitment. ↗

— Lynn Abbey

#balance #because #commitment #different #dull