Novelist Quotes

You can argue that writers are notoriously wrong about what they think is their best work.

Bret Easton Ellis

Life is as the sea, art a ship in which man conquers life's crushing formlessness, reducing it to a course, a series of swells, tides and wind currents inscribed on a chart.

Most true things are kind of corny, don't you think? But we make them more sophisticated out of sheer embarrassment.

Human beings are part of nature. Anything they do is natural. It's impossible for anything in nature to do anything unnatural.

Philip José Farmer

The faith is not the problem, the problem is the faithful.

Robert Ferrigno

Love is a wonderful thing, my dear, but it leaves you wide open for blackmail.

For parents to restrain the inclinations of their children in marriage is an usurped power.

Okay, I'm flattered, I appreciate your attempt at making me feel better after the fiasco with the pita rolls, but please ring up this beer I need it more than flattery.

Amanda Filipacchi

To be sympathetic without discrimination is so very debilitating.

Mercury. Kills the patient with the disease.

Gustave Flaubert

What about little microphones? What if everyone swallowed them, and they played the sounds of our hearts through a little speaker...I wonder if everyone's hearts would start to beat at the same time.

Jonathan Safran Foer

Rafe turned up looking like the glass of fashion and the mold of form.

Hulbert Footner

If sportswriting teaches you anything, and there is much truth to it as well as plenty of lies, it is that for your life to be worth anything you must sooner or later face the possibility of terrible, searing regret. Though you must also manage to avoid it or your life will be ruined.

I'd rather be in trouble for having done something than for not having done anything.

I am actually what my age and my upbringing have made me--a bourgeois who adheres to the British constitution, adheres to it rather than supports it, and the fact that this isn't dignified doesn't worry me.

The tornado came wriggling, jumping, whirling like a great green snake, darting out a score of glistening fangs.

The more abhorrent a news item the more comforting it was to be the recipient, since the fact that it had happened elsewhere proved that it had not happened here, was not happening here, and would therefore never happen here.

Look at everything upside down.Take absolutely nothing for granted.

The novelist has more and more to say to readers who have less and less time to read: where to find the energy to engage a culture in crisis when the crisis consists in the impossibility of engaging with the culture?

Jonathan Franzen

The name is not important anymore - it's the tone that counts. I feel like an old dog I know. He will come to any name you call him, just so long as your demeanor carries with it the promise of affection and food

At some point, you no longer feel pain. Sensation disappears and reason is dulled, until you lose all grasp of time and place.

Gabriel García Márquez

There is always a pleasure in unravelling a mystery, in catching at the gossamer clue which will guide to certainty.

Elizabeth Gaskell

A book exists at the intersection of the author's subconscious and the reader's response.

When we are mindful of every nuance of our natural world, we finally get the picture: that we are only given one dazzling moment of life here on Earth, and we must stand before that reality both humbled and elevated, subject to every law of our universe and grateful for our brief but intrinsic participation with it.

Elizabeth Gilbert

What would have been the effect upon religion if it had come to us through the minds of women?

Charlotte Perkins Gilman