A filmmaker has almost the same freedom as a novelist has when he buys himself some paper.
Stanley Kubrick

A novelist has a specific poetic license which also applies to his own life.
Jerzy Kosinski

A novelist is, like all mortals, more fully at home on the surface of the present than in the ooze of the past.
Vladimir Nabokov

A novelist should not be too intelligent either, although... he may be permitted to be an intellectual.
Anthony Burgess

A novelist who writes nothing for 10 years finds his reputation rising. Because I keep on producing books they say there must be something wrong with this fellow.
J. B. Priestley

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.
Terence Rattigan

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.
C. S. Forester

After I convinced them that I was a harmless novelist, I actually got them to give me a tour of the harem - which is usually off limits for tourists.
Dorothy Dunnett

Among the many problems which beset the novelist, not the least weighty is the choice of the moment at which to begin his novel.
Vita Sackville-West

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.
L. Neil Smith

As a novelist, I tell stories and people give me money. Then financial planners tell me stories and I give them money.
Martin Cruz Smith

Both the historian and the novelist view history as the struggle of a tiny minority, able and determined to make judgments, which is up against a vast and densely packed majority of the blind, who are led by their instincts and unable to think for themselves.
Lion Feuchtwanger

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.
Beth Henley

Dostoevski does not tell you what to think about his legend, but he requires that you think about it. The novelist was a deeply religious man and he always thought many readers missed that point about him.
Suzanne Fields

Every novelist has a different purpose - and often several purposes which might even be contradictory.
Irwin Shaw

For a novelist, a given historic situation is an anthropologic laboratory in which he explores his basic question: What is human existence?
Milan Kundera

For me, as a beginning novelist, all other living writers form a control group for whom the world is a placebo.
Nicholson Baker

Happy is the novelist who manages to preserve an actual love letter that he received when he was young within a work of fiction, embedded in it like a clean bullet in flabby flesh and quite secure there, among spurious lives.
Vladimir Nabokov

He was interviewed in the early '60s by a young novelist, Pati Hill.
George Plimpton

Historian: an unsuccessful novelist.
H. L. Mencken