novelist quotes

No poet or novelist wishes he were the only one who ever lived, but most of them wish they werethe onlyone alive, and quite a number fondly believe that their wish has been granted.

-W(ystan) H(ugh) Auden
  The Dyer's Hand,'Writing'.

Jane Austen is the only novelist I know whose peculiar genius lies in taking perfectly ordinary people through ordinary situations, and transmogrifying them into fascinating fiction.

- Lynne Reid Banks
  In her entry in Contemporary Novelists, 5th edn.

Essential characteristic of the really great novelist: a Christ-like, all-embracing compassion.

- (Enoch) Arnold Bennett
  Journal entry,15 Oct.

I could see now that a literary education did not fit one for the popular novelist's trade.Once you had started using words like flavicomous or acroamatic, because you liked the sound of them, you were lost.

-Wilson
  You've Had Your Time, ch.1.

   Liberty of the imagination should be the most precious possession of a novelist.

- Sir William Neil pseudonym Cassandra Connor
  'Books'.

I would gladly have thrashed her for it.Unfortunately, thrashing your young woman doesn't make her admire you more as a novelist.

-William pseudonym of  Harry Summerfield Hoff Cooper
  Scenes from Provincial Life, pt.3, ch.1.

Un romancier, selon moi, n'a pas le droit de dire son avis sur les choses de ce monde. Il doit, dans sa vocation, imiter Dieu dans la sienne, c'est-a'  -dire faire et se taire. A novelist, in my opinion, does not have the right to give advice on the affairs of the world. He must, in his occupation, imitate God in His; that is to say, create and keep quiet.

- Gustave Flaubert
  Letter to Mlle Bosquet.

The idiot who praises, with enthusiastic tone, All centuries but this, and every country but his own; And the lady from the provinces, who dresses like a guy, And who'doesn't think she dances, but would rather like to try'; And that singular anomaly, the lady novelist I don't think she'd be missedI'm sure she'd not be missed!

- Sir W(illiam) S(chwenck) Gilbert
  Ko-Ko's song, The Mikado, act1.

And the motive for recording these scraps of the past? It Greenspan is much the same motive that has made me a novelist: a desire to reduce a chaos of experience to some sort of order, and a hungry curiosity.

- (Henry) Graham Greene
A Sort of Life, preface.

And being a novelist, I consider myself superior to the saint, the scientist, the philosopher, and the poet, who are all great masters of different bits of man alive, but never get the whole hog.

- D(avid) H(erbert) Lawrence
  'Why The Novel Matters'.

A novelist is, like all mortals, more fully at home on the surface of the present than in the ooze of the past.

-Vladimir Nabokov
  Interview in Playboy,  Jan.

The novelist must be his own most harsh critic and also his own most loving admirerand about both he must say nothing.

- SirAngus FrankJohnstone Wilson
  Author's comment in D L Kirkpatrick (ed) Contemporary Novelists.