#novelist

The job of the novelist is to invent: to embroider, to color, to embellish, to make things up. ↗

— Donna Tartt

#embellish #invent #job #make #novelist

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

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

What description of clouds and sunsets was to the old novelist, description of scientific apparatus and methods is to the modern Scientific Detective writer. ↗

— Hugo Gernsback

#clouds #description #detective #methods #modern

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

Stories in which the destruction of society occurs are explorations of social fears and issues that filmmakers, novelists, playwrights, painters have been examining for a long time. ↗

— J. J. Abrams

#destruction #examining #fears #filmmakers #issues

I do not think men have more talent. There are a great many women in the arts; novelists, painters, sculptors, poets-but the proportion is far lower in the field of song writing. ↗

— Dorothy Fields

#far #field #great #i #i do

The bicycle, the bicycle surely, should always be the vehicle of novelists and poets. ↗

— Christopher Morley

#bicycle #novelists #poets #should #surely

In fact I don't think of literature, or music, or any art form as having a nationality. Where you're born is simply an accident of fate. I don't see why I shouldn't be more interested in say, Dickens, than in an author from Barcelona simply because I wasn't born in the UK. I do not have an ethno-centric view of things, much less of literature. Books hold no passports. There's only one true literary tradition: the human. ↗

— Carlos Ruiz Zafón

#european-novelists #literary-tradition #literature-in-translation #art

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

— Frank Norris

#function #life #novelist #sees #upon