Famous quotes by Novelists

"They think I'm going to be a schoolteacher but I'm going to be a poet"

Janet Frame, Novelist

"Writing a novel is not merely going on a shopping expedition across the border to an unreal land: it is hours and years spent in the factories, the streets, the cathedrals of the imagination"

Janet Frame, Novelist

"I first came out against Castro in June 1968, fifteen months after my book had been published, and you cannot imagine how quickly a void was created around me"

Guillermo Cabrera Infante, Novelist

"I'll not listen to reason... reason always means what someone else has got to say"

Elizabeth Gaskell, Novelist

"Time is a dressmaker specializing in alterations"

Faith Baldwin, Novelist

"I find war detestable, but those who praise it without participating in it even more so"

Romain Rolland, Novelist

"Character builds slowly, but it can be torn down within incredible swiftness"

Faith Baldwin, Novelist

"Oh the comfort, the inexpressible comfort of feeling safe with a person, having neither to weigh thoughts nor measure words, but pouring them all right out, just as they are"

Dinah Maria Mulock, Novelist

"A little credulity helps one on through life very smoothly"

Elizabeth Gaskell, Novelist

"As for pictures and museums, that don't trouble me. The worst of going abroad is that you've always got to look at things of that sort. To have to do it at home would be beyond a joke"

Margaret Oliphant, Novelist

"Insults are the business of the court"

Naguib Mahfouz, Novelist

"I believe society has a right to defend itself, just as the individual has the right to attack that with which he disagrees"

Naguib Mahfouz, Novelist

"Women is fine once you got 'em pinned down, boss, but when they ain't pinned down they're hell"

John Dos Passos, Novelist

"I think Ginsberg has done more harm to the craft that I honor and live by than anybody else by reducing it to a kind of mean that enables the most dubious practitioners to claim they are poets because they think, if the kind of thing Ginsberg does is poetry, I can do that"

James Dickey, Novelist

"It has been my fate in a long life of production to be credited chiefly with the equivocal virtue of industry, a quality so excellent in morals, so little satisfactory in art"

Margaret Oliphant, Novelist

"The creation of a world view is the work of a generation rather than of an individual, but we each of us, for better or for worse, add our brick to the edifice"

John Dos Passos, Novelist

"Every time a child says, I don't believe in fairies, there is a fairy somewhere that falls down dead"

J. M. Barrie, Novelist

"My success is not who I am"

Judith Guest, Novelist

"I want you to hear a new version of Dueling Banjos. Anyone else is welcome"

James Dickey, Novelist

"We are all failures at least, all the best of us are"

J. M. Barrie, Novelist

"It's not surprising to see in my own work, looking back, and in the work of some of my peers, an attention to family. It's nice to write a book that does tend toward significance and meaning, and where else are you sure of finding it?"

Jonathan Franzen, Novelist

"I was about 13, in some ways, when I wrote the first book. Approximately 18 when I wrote the second"

Jonathan Franzen, Novelist

"People who keep stiff upper lips find that it's damn hard to smile"

Judith Guest, Novelist

"Writers rush in where publishers fear to tread and where translators fear to tread"

Guillermo Cabrera Infante, Novelist

"Silence is the unbearable repartee"

Alexander Theroux, Novelist

"It's true, you can never eat a pet you name. And anyway, it would be like a ventriloquist eating his dummy"

Alexander Theroux, Novelist

"Writing is like carrying a fetus"

Edna O'Brien, Novelist

"Countries are either mothers or fathers, and engender the emotional bristle secretly reserved for either sire"

Edna O'Brien, Novelist

"Good taste is the modesty of the mind; that is why it cannot be either imitated or acquired"

Delphine de Girardin, Novelist

"I've been to a lot of places and done a lot of things, but writing was always first. It's a kind of pain I can't do without"

Robert Penn Warren, Novelist

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