Try everything; listen to everyone. Follow no one. You are your own story guru!

Mathias shrugged. After all, a criminal lawyer is not concerned with facts. He is concerned with probabilities. It is the novelist who is concerned with facts, whose job it is to say what a particular...

The difference between a novelist and someone who tinkers around with writing is this: novelists finish their books.

I was asked the other day in which era I would choose to live. As a historical novelist, it comes up sometimes. As a woman I’d have to say I’d like to live in the...

Part of the desire to see each other succeed is to stop putting a price on success.

Who is better off? The one who writes to revel in the voluptuousness of the life that surrounds them? Or the one who writes to escape the tediousness of that which awaits them outside? Whose...

As a historical novelist, there are few jobs more retrospective.

With the right tools, you can write anything …

I think that at the bottom of all art lies the impulse to preserve.

A novelist’s characters must be with him as he lies down to sleep, and as he wakes from his dreams. He must learn to hate them and to love them.

If your not annoying somebody, you’re not alive.

I’m a novelist by trade and my job is to write a story rather than reconstruct actual events.

Nothing travels faster than the speed of light, with the possible exception of bad news, which obeys its own special laws.

Rich will be my life if I can keep my memories full and brimming, and record them on clear-eyed mornings while I set joyously to work setting pen to holy craft.

As a historical novelist, there is very little I like more than spending time sorting through boxes of old letters, diaries, maps, trinkets, and baubles.

You write once and you can call yourself a writer, but it takes three novels before you can call yourself a novelist. The first two could have just been lucky. One day, I will finish...

The moment I close my eyes, I see you and sleep vanishes. I’m awake the entire night, revisiting ourmemories together. The night seems to stretch on forever.

All novelists are.

I am not much of a researcher as a novelist; I write mainly from experience.

People make interesting assumptions about the profession. The writer is a mysterious figure, wandering lonely as a cloud, fired by inspiration, or perhaps a cocktail or two.

If you hear voices, you’re a lunatic. If you write down what they say, you’re an author.

I was forced to wander, having no one, forced by my nature to keep wandering because wandering was the only thing that I believed in, and the only thing that believed in me.

A short story is a sprint, a novel is a marathon. Sprinters have seconds to get from here to there and then they are finished. Marathoners have to carefully pace themselves so that they don’t...

Why are you behaving like this? You know how much I love you … and Ibelieve you love me as much, so why are you avoiding me?

It is possible to be a great novelist – that is, to render a veracious account of your times – and a bad writer – that is, an incompetent practitioner of applied linguistics.

There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book.Books are well written, or badly written. That is all.

As a novelist it is my job to tell stories that inspire and entertain but I am increasingly mindful that many of these historical tales (which of themselves are fascinating) relate directly to our issues...

The lady who works in the grocery store at the corner of my block is called Denise, and she’s one of America’s great unpublished novelists. Over the years she’s written forty-two romantic novels, none of...

Passionate attraction to someone of the opposite sex will make a hero or a fool of a novelist each time.

George Eliot was the blend of four: the intellectual, psychologist, moralist and realist. In her novels, especially in Adam Bede, she used her intellect to explain the psyche of human beings and out of her...

I love you so much. Our love is eternal.

Film and novel characters are often stereotyped, but racial stereotyping in many novels or films creates & encourages labelling, discrimination & racism. ~Angelica Hopes

You do not learn how to write novels in a writing program. You learn how by leading an interesting life. Open yourself up to all experience. Let life pour through you the way light pours...

I’m a professional writer and I consider it part of my job to publicise my work and these days part of that job is done online.

…Cody is furiously explaining to his little son Tim ‘Never let the right hand know what your left hand is doing’…Page 100.

I gain nothing but pleasure from writing fiction; short stories are foreplay, novellas are heavy petting – but novels are the full monte. Frankly, if I didn’t enjoy writing novels I wouldn’t do it –...

This was what I came to found. The conquest of loneliness was the missing link that was one day going to make a decent novelist out of me. If you are out here and cannot...

I know you would be watching over me all through this journey called life… whenever I look next to me, I feel like you arehere… and a part of you is within me in the...

An authors publication date never matters, a book not read yet will always be New”…

Writers possess magic. It’s in their words. They compose phrases as powerful as incantations, creating illusions in the minds of readers. These spells make eyes envision things that aren’t real; they make hearts feel things...

I spend a lot of time imagining things – in fact, you could say that imagining things is my job.

Sometimes you can write about a character’s day in under a minute and sometimes it takes a day just to write about a minute.

Fiction is overrated, Fly. We’ve discussed this. In the time it takes those novelist fuckers to contemplate a few poetic passages, a thousand kids die from malnutrition. Immediacy, man, that’s what counts.

A friend worth knowing tolerates your flaws while a friend worth keeping loves you in spite of them.

Love is something that is beyond us. We can’t anticipate love. When, where and with whom we fall in love is coincidental and wonderful for the same reason.

The novelist is more like a pregnant woman who delivers her own child unaided. A messy procedure, with lots of groaning.

I bleed words.I dream in narrative. I live in infinite worlds.I befriend figmental characters.I wish on stars in other galaxies.I harvest stories from a brooding muse.I bloom under moonlight in hushed seclusion.I am a writer.

On Twitter, people who had read my book followed me and I could see what else they were reading, why they’d liked what I’d written and by the by, more about them than I’d ever...

No matter how much enthusiasm and effort you put into writing, if you totally lack literary talent you can forget about being a novelist.

Being a novelist is not the sort of thing we can shut off. It infests every bit of us until we lose the boundary between Person and Writer, like one of those color charts where...