It is true that novelists are shameless and obey no decent law, and they are not to be trusted on any account, but some Mysteries even they must honor.

A novelist can’t be without a kimono and pen!(Shigure)

I now understand that writing fiction was a seed planted in my soul, though I would not be ready to grow that seed for a long time.

The bicycle, the bicycle surely, should always be the vehicle of novelists and poets.

character,” but all it amounts to is that the writers are enjoying themselves writing lies and the readers are enjoying themselves reading lies. In fact, there is no such thing as character, something fixed and...

They know a million tricks, those novelists. Take Doctor Goebbels; that’s how he started out, writing fiction. Appeals to the base lusts that hide in everyone no matter how respectable on the surface. Yes, the...

Novelists should never allow themselves to weary of the study of real life. If they observed this duty conscientiously, they would give us fewer pictures chequered with vivid contrasts of light and shade; they would...

Read a thousand books, and your words will flow like a river.

…he was after all, a novelist…and a novelist was simply a fellow who got paid to tell lies. The bigger the lies, the better the pay.

He had entered another imaginative world, one connected to the beginning of his life as a writer, to the Napoleonic world that had been a lifelong metaphor for the power of art, for the empire...

Military people never seem to apologize for killing each other yet novelists feel ashamed for writing some nice inert paper book that is not certain to be read by anybody.

I believe that all novels, … deal with character, and that it is to express character – not to preach doctrines, sing songs, or celebrate the glories of the British Empire, that the form of...

Novelists should be like scientists, dissecting the cadaver.

The only time I’ve ever learned anything from a review was when John Lanchester wrote a piece in the Guardian about my second novel, The Heather Blazing. He said that, together with the previous novel,...

Copywriters, journalists, mainstream authors, ghostwriters, bloggers and advertising creatives have as much right to think of themselves as good writers as academics, poets, or literary novelists.

Like most novelists, I like to do exactly the opposite of what I’m told. It’s in my nature as a novelist. Novelists can’t trust anything they haven’t seen with their own eyes or touched with...

All novelists write in a different way, but I always write in longhand and then do two versions of typescript on a computer.

Grabbing readers by the imagination is a writer’s job.

Ich hörte, dass Karl May der Öffentlichkeit so lange als guter Schriftsteller galt, bis irgendwelche Missetaten aus seiner Jugend bekannt wurden. Angenommen aber, er hat sie begangen, so beweist mir das nichts gegen ihn –...

As it is I’m a dated novelist, whom hardly anybody reads, or if they do, most of them don’t understand what I am on about. Certainly I wish I had never written Voss, which is...

The writing talent of Edinburgh is textured – we have poets, novelists, non-fiction writers, dramatists and more.

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

No poet or novelist wishes he was the only one who ever lived, but most of them wish they were the only one alive, and quite a number believe their wish has been granted.

But the other Ministers considered that to employ a magician was one thing, novelists were quite another and they would not stoop to it.

With the right tools, you can write anything …

Fueled by my inspiration, I ran across the room to steal the cup of coffee the bookshelf had taken prisoner. Lapping the black watery brew like a hyena, I tossed the empty cup aside. I...

I read not so long ago about the construction of a large telescope in Chile’s Atacama Desert, where rainfall can average a millimetre a year and the air is fifty times as dry as the...

Novelists invent characters; poets invent themselves.

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

I am certain that a novelist is someone who attributes a different reality-value to the characters and events of his story than to those of ‘real’ life. A novelist is someone who confuses his own...

Alternate history fascinates me, as it fascinates all novelists, because ‘What if?’ is the big thing.

The novelist is condemned to wander all his life. Homeless and blind like Oedipus he wanders until death. And so let us protect the novelist and adore him, with pity, honor, and love.