Famous quotes by Novelists

"Nothing to be done, really, about animals. Anything you do looks foolish. The answer isn't in us. It's almost as if we're put here on earth to show how silly they aren't"

Russell Hoban, Novelist

"The search for the truth is the most important work in the whole world, and the most dangerous"

James Clavell, Novelist

"Of the first seven novels I wrote, numbers four and five were published. Numbers one, two, three, six, and seven have never seen the light of day... and rightly so"

Sue Grafton, Novelist

"The country is in an extraordinary ferment"

William Hamilton Maxwell, Novelist

"You know, even I have had work or ideas come through me from a source that I honestly cannot identify. And what is that thing? And how are we to relate to it in a way that will not make us lose our minds, but, in fact, might actually keep us sane?"

Elizabeth Gilbert, Novelist

"At risk of sounding foully pompous, I think that writers' groups are probably very useful at the beginning of a writing career"

Bernard Cornwell, Novelist

"Some fellow from the Third World kept hammering for prizes for a Communist film which was rotten"

Patricia Highsmith, Novelist

"Art is the stored honey of the human soul, gathered on wings of misery and travail"

Theodore Dreiser, Novelist

"Depth must be hidden. Where? On the surface"

Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Novelist

"Marriage, in life, is like a duel in the midst of a battle"

Edmond About, Novelist

"I don't use a pen. I write with a goose quill dipped in venom"

Jay Dratler, Novelist

"Income tax returns are the most imaginative fiction being written today"

Herman Wouk, Novelist

"For things to have value in man's world, they are given the role of commodities. Among man's oldest and most constant commodity is woman"

Ana Castillo, Novelist

"Intimate relationships are a gold mine for literature to explore, to understand, to describe"

A. B. Yehoshua, Novelist

"Life is not a dress rehearsal"

Rose Tremain, Novelist

"Some of the best fan mail I get are from our men and women in the military and intelligence communities. They say, 'Boy, you do your homework, this is exactly how we're doing it.'"

Brad Thor, Novelist

"But you can try to read books at the wrong time or for the wrong reasons"

Jonathan Coe, Novelist

"I watch what I eat every day. I mean, who actually eats with their eyes closed?"

Brian Celio, Novelist

"It is because nations tend towards stupidity and baseness that mankind moves so slowly; it is because individuals have a capacity for better things that it moves at all"

George Gissing, Novelist

"The tragedy is not that love doesn't last; the tragedy is the love that lasts"

Shirley Hazzard, Novelist

"Happiness is a sunbeam which may pass through a thousand bosoms without losing a particle of its original ray; nay, when it strikes on a kindred heart, like the converged light on a mirror, it reflects itself with redoubled brightness. It is not perfected till it is shared"

Jane Porter, Novelist

"The secularists in Turkey haven't underestimated religion, they just made the mistake of believing they could control it with the power of the army alone"

Orhan Pamuk, Novelist

"I love comic books, and always did as a kid"

Rick Moody, Novelist

"If you are lucky enough to find a way of life you love, you have to find the courage to live it"

John Irving, Novelist

"I feel horribly vindicated. Three thousand people died who didn't have to die"

Caleb Carr, Novelist

"An Indian tribe is sovereign to the extent that the U.S. permits it to be sovereign"

Russell Smith, Novelist

"Take hope from the heart of man, and you make him a beast of prey"

Ouida, Novelist

"I would advise any beginning writer to write the first drafts as if no one else will ever read them - without a thought about publication - and only in the last draft to consider how the work will look from the outside"

Anne Tyler, Novelist

"Day is like day, as two beads in a rosary, unless changes of weather form the only variety"

Henryk Sienkiewicz, Novelist

"I have heard of novels started in the middle, at the end, written in patches to be joined together later, but I have never felt the slightest desire to do this"

C. S. Forester, Novelist

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