#novelist

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

There's a unique bond of trust between readers and authors that I don't believe exists in any other art form; as a reader, I trust a novelist to give me his or her best effort, however flawed. ↗

— Dan Simmons

#art #art form #authors #believe #best

Personally, I have never wished I were a male novelist. ↗

— Curtis Sittenfeld

#male #never #novelist #personally #were

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

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

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

In Maurice I tried to create a character who was completely unlike myself or what I supposed myself to be: someone handsome, healthy, bodily attractive, mentally torpid, not a bad business man and rather a snob. Into this mixture I dropped an ingredient that puzzles him, wakes him up, torments him and finally saves him. ↗

— E.M. Forster

#glbtq #novelist #business

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

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