#novelist

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

No poet or novelist wishes he were the only one who ever lived, but most of them wish they were the only one alive, and quite a number fondly believe their wish has been granted. ↗

— W. H. Auden

#been #believe #ever #fondly #granted

Kingsley Amis was one of a trio of brilliant comic novelists who made English literature sparkle in the twentieth century. ↗

— Russell Baker

#century #comic #english #english literature #literature

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

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

Who is better off? The one who writes to revel in the voluptuousness of the life that surrounds them? Or the one who writes to escape the tediousness of that which awaits them outside? Whose flame will last longer? ↗

— Roman Payne

#books #escape #flame #heroic #heroism

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

A novelist's characters must be with him as he lies down to sleep, and as he wakes from his dreams. He must learn to hate them and to love them. ↗

— Anthony Trollopel

#dreams #hate #love #novelist #sleep

Not until my middle thirties did I consider myself a novelist. ↗

— Rita Mae Brown

#did #i #middle #myself #novelist

A whim, a passing mood, readily induces the novelist to move hearth and home elsewhere. He can always plead work as an excuse to get him out of the clutches of bothersome hosts. ↗

— C. S. Forester

#clutches #elsewhere #excuse #get #hearth