#novelist

I don't really consider myself a novelist, it just came out purely by accident. ↗

— Wole Soyinka

#came #consider #i #just #myself

The novel, for me, was an accident. I really don't consider myself a novelist. ↗

— Wole Soyinka

#consider #i #me #myself #novel

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

I wanted nothing less than to be a fiction writer when I was a kid. If you had told me I would be an artist or novelist when I grew up, I would have laughed in your face. ↗

— Caleb Carr

#face #fiction #fiction writer #grew #had

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

I never met anybody in my life who says, I want to be a critic. People want to be a fireman, poet, novelist. ↗

— Leslie Fiedler

#critic #fireman #i #life #met

I think, in common with a lot of novelists, I wasn't the most athletic guy at school. ↗

— Chris Cleave

#common #guy #i #i think #lot

To me, the newspaper business was a way to learn about life and how things worked in the real world and how people spoke. You learn all the skills - you learn to listen, you learn to take notes - everything you use later as a novelist was valuable training in the newspaper world. But I always wanted to write novels. ↗

— Carl Hiaasen

#always #business #everything #how #i

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

I'm always determined that as a novelist I'm going to go out there and research my characters very thoroughly before I start writing. ↗

— Chris Cleave

#before #characters #determined #go #going