#novelist

I was directed because I knew I wanted to be a novelist, but I didn't have a very good job or a way of getting published. I found those years to be among the most difficult of my life. ↗

— Jeffrey Eugenides

#because #difficult #directed #found #getting

Novelists are always resisting autobiographical readings of their work, because they know how false those can be. ↗

— Jeffrey Eugenides

#autobiographical #because #false #how #know

Some Pulitzer winners - novelists - have confided to me that getting the prize screwed them up. It messed with their heads. That hasn't been my experience. ↗

— Jeffrey Eugenides

#confided #experience #getting #hasn #heads

Here's a secret. Many novelists, if they are pressed and if they are being honest, will admit that the finished book is a rather rough translation of the book they'd intended to write. ↗

— Michael Cunningham

#being #being honest #book #finished #here

To be a novelist, all I need is a pen and a piece of paper. ↗

— Quentin Tarantino

#need #novelist #paper #pen #piece

When I'm writing a novel, I'm dealing with a double life. I live in the present at the same time that I live in the past with my characters. It is this that makes a novelist so eccentric and unpleasant. ↗

— John Phillips Marquand

#dealing #double #eccentric #i #in the past

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

I read not so long ago about the construction of a large telescope in Chile's Atacama Desert, where rainfall can average a millimetre a year and the air is fifty times as dry as the air in Death Valley. Needless to say, skies over the Atacama are pristine. The pilgrim astronomer ventures to the earth’s ravaged reaches in order to peer more keenly at other worlds, and I suppose the novelist is up to something similar. ↗

— Brad Leithauser

#astronomy #chile #metaphor #novelists #telescope

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

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

— Frank Norris

#function #life #novelist #sees #upon