There are many reasons why novelists write, but they all have one thing in common - a need to create an alternative world.
America is becoming so educated that ignorance will be a novelty. I will belong to the select few.
A good novel tells us the truth about its hero; but a bad novel tells us the truth about its author.
Every journalist has a novel in him, which is an excellent place for it.
The very essence of the creative is its novelty, and hence we have no standard by which to judge it.
Historian: an unsuccessful novelist.
A fact is a simple statement that everyone believes. It is innocent, unless found guilty. A hypothesis is a novel suggestion that no one wants to believe. It is guilty, until found effective.
The radical novelty of modern science lies precisely in the rejection of the belief... that the forces which move the stars and atoms are contingent upon the preferences of the human heart.
There are three rules for writing a novel. Unfortunately, no one knows what they are.
The ordinariness of living to be old is too novel a thing to appreciate.
Aphorisms are bad for novels. They stick in the reader's teeth.
I got this idea of doing a really serious big work-it would be precisely like a novel, with a single difference: Every word of it would be true from beginning to end.
I always seem to get inspiration and renewed vitality by contact with this great novel land of yours which sticks up out of the Atlantic.
At a certain point my novels set. They set just as hard as that jam jar. And then I know they are finished.
Writing a story or a novel is one way of discovering sequence in experience, of stumbling upon cause and effect in the happenings of a writer's own life.
Life is God's novel. Let him write it.