Famous Novelist Quotes & Sayings

You'd be so lean, that blast of January
Would blow you through and through. Now, my fair'st friend,
I would I had some flowers o' the spring that might
Become your time of day. — William Shakespeare

Modern society has evolved to the point where we counter the old-fashioned fatalism surrounding the word 'cancer' by embracing the idea of the Uber-mind - that our will possesses nearly supernatural powers. — Abraham Verghese

If he saw himself as a famous novelist then he would have known she would be there, but if he saw himself as someone she had met in the bar, well, he was right. She — Ann Patchett

In the whole of your absurd past you discover so much that's absurd, so much deceit and credulity, that it might be a good idea to stop being young this minute, to wait for youth to break away from you and pass you by, to watch it going away, receding in the distance, to see all its vanity, run your hand through the empty space it has left behind, take a last look at it, and then start moving, make sure your youth has really gone, and then calmly, all by yourself, cross to the other side of Time to see what people and things really look like. — Louis-Ferdinand Celine

Sammy dreamed the usual Brooklyn dreams of flight and transformation and escape. He dreamed with fierce contrivance, transmuting himself into a major American novelist, or a famous smart person, like Clifton Fadiman, or perhaps into a heroic doctor; or developing, through practice and sheer force of will, the mental powers that would give him a preternatural control over the hearts and minds of men. — Michael Chabon

When young people say I want to be a novelist, I'd say, think very carefully about it. There will be very few rewards, you probably won't make any money, you probably won't become famous, and you will spend your whole life locked up in a room by yourself worrying about how to survive. — Paul Auster

Founders never leave our memories for they leave indelible footprints on our minds. They give us the reasons to look back and ponder. They give us the reasons to look forward with the hope and aspirations to beating their footprints of distinctiveness. Their mistakes are our lessons and the reasons to reason. — Ernest Agyemang Yeboah

I'm a novelist who read a lot as a kid. When you grow up on books and then grow up to write books, famous authors are a lot more meaningful to you than TV and movie stars. — Claire Scovell LaZebnik

To speak today of a famous novelist is like speaking of a famous cabinetmaker or speedboat designer. Adjective is inappropriate to noun. — Gore Vidal

But as it turned out, the two had a great deal in common, for both Bailey and Thackeray (named for the famous novelist William Makepeace Thackeray, author of Vanity Fair) were devoted bibliophiles who believed that "a book a day kept the world at bay," as Thackeray was fond of saying. Bailey was the offspring of a generation of badgers who insisted that "Reader" was the most rewarding vocation to which a virtuous badger might be called and who gauged their week's anticipated pleasure by the height of their to-be-read pile. (Perhaps you know people like this. I do.) — Susan Wittig Albert

Lolita is famous, not I. I am an obscure, doubly obscure, novelist with an unpronounceable name. — Vladimir Nabokov

No single man can be taken as a model for a perfect figure, for no man lives on earth who is endowed with the whole of beauty. — Albrecht Durer

Females do not have orgasms every time they have sex. — Sue Johanson

This Vladimir Brusiloff to whom I have referred was the famous Russian novelist ... Vladimir specialized in gray studies of hopeless misery, where nothing happened till page three hundred and eighty, when the moujik decided to commit suicide ...
Cuthbert was an optimist at heart, and it seemed to him that, at the rate at which the inhabitants of that interesting country were murdering one another, the supply of Russian novelists must eventually give out. — P.G. Wodehouse

Here was the world-famous novelist with her penchant for detail; yet, in her observations of a prostitute with a customer, she had failed to come away with the most important detail of all. She could never identify the murderer; she could barely describe him. She'd made a point of not looking at him! — John Irving

For want of modesty is want of sense. — Benjamin Franklin

I was able to capture on film things the actors didn't even know they were doing. — Elia Kazan

Today's youth cannot miss something they have never known, but I fear that there are no current fictional characters whose impact and influence will last with such abiding affection into their 'sore and yellow' as this splendid man's creations have in mine! — Peter Cushing

The aspiring novelist in me wants a secret tunnel hidden behind a false wall, or a poster of a famous movie star, or — Joe Hill