Novelists Quotes

I think women are foolish to pretend they are equal to men, they are far superior and always have been.

I am a cage, in search of a bird.

All language is but a poor translation.

I owe everything I am and everything I will ever be to books.

Be proud of your scars. They remind you that you have the will to live.

We Jews, we are the destroyers and will remain the destroyers. Nothing you can do will meet our demands and needs. We will forever destroy because we want a world of our own.

Everything in the world began with a yes. One molecule said yes to another molecule and life was born.

There are seeds of self-destruction in all of us that will bear only unhappiness if allowed to grow.

Cosmic time is the same for everyone, but human time differs with each person. Time flows in the same way for all human beings; every human being flows through time in a different way.

A mind attacked and conquered is guided easily away from the paths of its own soul.

The human heart is bigger than the world.

Was our life nothing more than a sequence of anonymous screams in a desert of indifferent stars?

It is when we are most lost that we sometimes find our truest friends.

Language is courage: the ability to conceive a thought, to speak it, and by doing so to make it true.

We're all going to die, all of us, what a circus! That alone should make us love each other but it doesn't. We are terrorized and flattened by trivialities, we are eaten up by nothing.

Novels are fictions and therefore they tell lies, but through those lies every novelist attempts to tell the truth about the world.

It would be wrong to refuse to face the fact that everything is fundamentally sick and sad.

Words are one thing, deeds are quite another.

Work is against human nature. The proof is that it makes us tired.

As a novelist, I have a somewhat higher soapbox to stand on than most people do when it comes to talking back to the merchants of fear.

It is at least worth arguing that there is a modicum of the creative novelist in all of us, and that this absorption with how men get out of difficulties, single-handedly and alone if possible, is the stuff of which we weave the warp and woof of our own better dramatic imaginings.

It is increasingly clear that the fate of the universe will come to depend more and more on individuals as the bungling of bureaucracy permeates every corner of our existence.

Historian: an unsuccessful novelist.

Things which do not grow and change are dead things.

I cannot and do not live in the world of discretion, not as a writer, anyway. I would prefer to, I assure you - it would make life easier. But discretion is, unfortunately, not for novelists.

Most writers are not quick-witted when they talk. Novelists, in particular, drag themselves around in society like gut-shot bears.

A whim, a passing mood, readily induces the novelist to move hearth and home elsewhere. He can always plead work as an excuse to get him out of the clutches of bothersome hosts.

Some people bring out the worst in you, others bring out the best, and then there are those remarkably rare, addictive ones who just bring out the most. Of everything.

This tremendous world I have inside of me. How to free myself, and this world, without tearing myself to pieces. And rather tear myself to a thousand pieces than be buried with this world within me.

One of the cruelest things you can do to another person is pretend you care about them more than you really do.

A playwright must be his own audience. A novelist may lose his readers for a few pages; a playwright never dares lose his audience for a minute.

You know what they say: When people start burning books they'll soon burn human beings.

It's my belief that people enter your life at exactly the right time.

I’ve always thought a novelist only has one character and that is himself or herself.

And then, as if written by the hand of a bad novelist, an incredible thing happened.

History is the history of human behavior, and human behavior is the raw material of fiction. Most people recognize that novelists do research to get the facts right - how a glove factory works, for example, or how courtesans in imperial Japan dressed.

God pity the poor novelist.

But here's the thing: what you do as a screenwriter is you sell your copyright. As a novelist, as a poet, as a playwright, you maintain your copyright.

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

The terrorist is the one with the small bomb.

I want to write books that unlock the traffic jam in everybody's head.

The true novelist is one who understands the work as a continuous poem, is a myth-maker, and the wonder of the art resides in the endless different ways of telling a story.

A person is, among all else, a material thing, easily torn and not easily mended.

You must be prepared to work always without applause.

Never say you know the last word about any human heart.

What greater wealth is there than to own your life and to spend it on growing? Every living thing must grow. It can't stand still. It must grow or perish.

As a novelist, I ask of myself only that I tell the truth and that I tell it beautifully.

I'm at the point where going forward is easier than going back.

You have to say I am forgiven again and again until it becomes the story you believe about yourself.

I was given a dictionary when I was seven, and I read it because I had nothing else to read. I read it the way you read a book.