#novelist

Being a novelist and being a mother have exactly coincided in my life: the call from my agent saying that I had a contract for my first novel - that was on my answering phone message when I got back from the hospital with my first child. ↗

— Barbara Kingsolver

#answering #back #being #call #child

You do not learn how to write novels in a writing program. You learn how by leading an interesting life. Open yourself up to all experience. Let life pour through you the way light pours through leaves. ↗

— Pat Conroy

#novelist #write #writer #experience

For me, as a beginning novelist, all other living writers form a control group for whom the world is a placebo. ↗

— Nicholson Baker

#control #form #group #living #me

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

A playwright must be his own audience. A novelist may lose his readers for a few pages; a playwright never dares lose his audience for a minute. ↗

— Terence Rattigan

#dares #few #his #lose #may

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

Many novelists take well-defined, precise characters, whose stories are sometimes of mediocre interest, and place them in an important historical context, which remains secondary in spite of everything. ↗

— Raymond Queneau

#context #everything #historical #important #interest

I cannot and do not live in the world of discretion, not as a writer, anyway. I would prefer to, I assure you - it would make life easier. But discretion is, unfortunately, not for novelists. ↗

— Philip Roth

#assure #cannot #discretion #easier #i

In effect I am not a novelist, but rather a failed essayist who started to write novels because he didn't know how to write essays. ↗

— Jose Saramago

#because #effect #essayist #essays #failed

Every novelist has a different purpose - and often several purposes which might even be contradictory. ↗

— Irwin Shaw

#different #even #every #might #novelist