Quotes of Novelist - somelinesforyou

“ I suppose some editors are failed writers; but so are most writers. ”

- T. S. Eliot

“ Nothing gives an author so much pleasure as to find his works respectfully quoted by other learned authors. ”

- Benjamin Franklin

“ For a country to have a great writer is like having another government. That's why no rTgime has ever loved great writers, only minor ones. ”

- Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

“ My mother would say it is literally ghost writers who come to me (Tan is the author of what became The Joy Luck Club). ”

- Amy Tan

“ They're fancy talkers about themselves, writers. If I had to give young writers advice, I would say don't listen to writers talking about writing or themselves. ”

- Lillian Hellman

“ I think of myself as a storyteller, and that is it. ”

- Tanith Lee

“ They can't yank a novelist like they can a pitcher. A novelist has to go the full nine, even if it kills him. ”

- Ernest Hemingway

“ A petty reason perhaps why novelists more and more try to keep a distance from journalists is that novelists are trying to write the truth and journalists are trying to write fiction. ”

- Graham Greene

“ Writing has power, but its power has no vector. Writers can stir the mind, but they can't direct it. Time changes things, God changes things, the dictators change things, but writers can't change anything. ”

- Isaac Bashevis Singer

“ What is difficult is the promotion, balancing the public side of a writer's life with the writing. I think that's something a lot of writers are having to face. Writers have become much more public now. ”

- Kazuo Ishiguro

“ Next to the writer of real estate advertisements, the autobiographer is the most suspect of prose artists. ”

- Donal Henahan

“ Things were easier for the old novelists who saw people all of a piece. Speaking generally, their heroes were good through and through, their villains wholly bad. ”

- W. Somerset Maugham

“ In comparing various authors with one another, I have discovered that some of the gravest and latest writers have transcribed, word for word, from former works, without making acknowledgment. ”

- Pliny the Elder

“ Literature does not exist in a vacuum. Writers as such have a definite social function exactly proportional to their ability as writers. This is their main use. ”

- Ezra

“ The most essential gift for a good writer is a built-in, shock-proof, shit detector. This is the writer's radar and all great writers have had it. ”

- Ernest Hemingway

“ When you take stuff from one writer it's plagiarism; but when you take it from many writers, it's research. ”

- Wilson Mizner

“ The writer isn't made in a vacuum. Writers are witnesses. The reason we need writers is because we need witnesses to this terrifying century. ”

- E. L. Doctorow

“ 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

“ I didn't know writers could be real live people, because I never knew any writers. ”

- Rita Dove

“ The best author will be the one who is ashamed to become a writer. ”

- Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

“ Writers always know whether you like them or not. ”

- Leslie Fiedler

“ If you wish to be a leader you will be frustrated, for very few people wish to be led. If you aim to be a servant you will never be frustrated. ”

- Frank F. Warren

“ Perhaps it would be better not to be a writer, but if you must, then write. ”

- J. B. Priestley

“ Perhaps it would be better for science, that all criticism should be avowed. ”

- Charles Babbage

“ But I am the same storyteller as always. ”

- Terry Brooks

“ For a country to have a great writer is like having a second government. That is why no regime has ever loved great writers, only minor ones. ”

- Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

“ Ilike ideas writers have that I might not have written. Writers are there for a reason… to write for me. ”

- Tim Roth

“ I'm a writer, and what I do is write. I wasn't able to do anything else. ”

- Hugh Leonard

“ I'm a good storyteller. ”

- Sophie Marceau

“ It was really written as most, I think, books are by writers - for themselves. There was something that just had to be written, in a way that it had to be written. If you know what I mean. ”

- Norton Juster
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