Definition of Novelist

Novelist

An innovator; an asserter of novelty.

A writer of news.

A writer of a novel or novels.

Related Definitions:

An, Asserter, Innovator, News, Novel, Novelty, Of, Or, Writer

Novelist Quotations

Historian: an unsuccessful novelist.
H. L. Mencken

It's like a novelist writing far out things. If it makes a point and makes sense, then people like to read that. But if it's off in left field and goes over the edge, you lose it. The same with musical talent, I think.
Johnny Cash

With a novelist, like a surgeon, you have to get a feeling that you've fallen into good hands - someone from whom you can accept the anesthetic with confidence.
Saul Bellow

Manners are of such great consequence to the novelist that any kind will do. Bad manners are better than no manners at all, and because we are losing our customary manners, we are probably overly conscious of them; this seems to be a condition that produces writers.
Flannery O'Connor

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

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

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

If a person is not talented enough to be a novelist, not smart enough to be a lawyer, and his hands are too shaky to perform operations, he becomes a journalist.
Norman Mailer

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

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

To be a novelist, all I need is a pen and a piece of paper.
Quentin Tarantino

Sigmund Freud was a novelist with a scientific background. He just didn't know he was a novelist. All those damn psychiatrists after him, they didn't know he was a novelist either.
John Irving

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

The economy of a novelist is a little like that of a careful housewife who is unwilling to throw away anything that might perhaps serve its turn.
Graham Greene

I think the hardest part of writing is revising. And by that I mean the following: A novelist has to create the piece of marble and then chip away to find the figure in it.
Chaim Potok

Yes, but also one of the problems for a novelist in Ireland is the fact that there are no formal manners. I mean some people have beautiful manners but there's no kind of agreed form of manners.
John McGahern

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

In effect I am not a novelist, but rather a failed essayist who started to write novels because he didn't know how to write essays.
Jose Saramago

I am a better novelist than a poet, playwright, or essayist.
Jose Saramago

The novel, for me, was an accident. I really don't consider myself a novelist.
Wole Soyinka

I don't really consider myself a novelist, it just came out purely by accident.
Wole Soyinka

I never see a novel as a film while I'm writing it. Mostly because novels and films are so different, and I'm such an internal novelist.
Alice Hoffman

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

The essayist has to follow a certain intellectual pattern. The novelist has the advantage of using fantasy, of being subjective.
Manuel Puig

If the novelist shares his or her problems with the characters, he or she is able to study his personal unconscious.
Manuel Puig

Jane Austen was an extraordinary woman; to actually be able to survive as a novelist in those days - unmarried - was just unheard of.
Julie Walters

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

In order for a long piece of work to engage a novelist over an extended period of time, it has to deal with questions that you find very important, that you're trying to work out.
Donna Tartt

The suspense of a novel is not only in the reader, but in the novelist, who is intensely curious about what will happen to the hero.
Mary McCarthy

I never met anybody in my life who says, I want to be a critic. People want to be a fireman, poet, novelist.
Leslie Fiedler

More Novelist Quotations

Novelist Translations

novelist in Dutch is romanschrijver
novelist in German is Romanschriftsteller
novelist in Spanish is novelista

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