I hadn't meant to do the pattern of publishing short stories and then a novel. I thought, 'I'm a novelist. I know it.' But you have to kind of write a lot of bad novels before you can write a good one, I think, so I did that. But meanwhile, I loved the short stories I did.

Andrew Sean Greer

If a novelist tells you something she knows or thinks, and you believe her, that is not because either of you think she is God, but because she is doing her work - as a novelist.

A. S. Byatt

I am not an academic who happens to have written a novel. I am a novelist who happens to be quite good academically.

A. S. Byatt

I hated being a novelist when I was 20 - I had nothing to write about.

A. S. Byatt

You learn different things through fiction. Historians are always making a plot about how certain things came to happen. Whereas a novelist looks at tiny little things and builds up a sort of map, like a painting, so that you see the shapes of things.

A. S. Byatt

Reading a newspaper is like reading someone's letters, as opposed to a biography or a history. The writer really does not know what will happen. A novelist needs to feel what that is like.

A. S. Byatt

The thing I love about being a novelist is that with each project, you invent a new world. You approach it with a different set of aesthetic and structural ideas, and you grapple with a different series of problems in figuring out how to tell the story. And yet there are certain concerns that stay constant.

Adam Mansbach

If you're a novelist, as I am in real life, you're usually so desperate for any kind of feedback.

Adam Mansbach

I love the idea of trying to do the work of old-fashioned novelists of plotting and of really making you curious about what's going to happen next and all that, but also trying to load it up with your weird thoughts and opinions.

Adrian Tomine

Alan Moore's writing is almost novelistic. It's very intricate and wordy and smart.

Adrianne Palicki

It's almost a blessing when we meet people who naturally want to do the sort of things that are in high demand in society. What a gift to do that, as opposed to other people who would say, 'I want to be a novelist but actually I have to be an accountant.'

Alain de Botton

Former Dublin newsman Paul Lynch made his debut as a novelist a few years ago with a book called 'Red Sky in Morning,' set in mid-19th century County Donegal, where a rage-driven farmer has committed a murder with devastating results.

Alan Cheuse

We want a world with both historians and novelists, don't we? Not with one or the other. Every fiction writer crosses the line that divides artistry and documentation - or erases it.

Alan Cheuse

When I get asked about novelists I like, they tend to be white, male, and British, like Graham Greene. They write the kind of declarative sentences I like. I don't like to be deflected by acrobatics.

Alan Furst

I never wanted to be a Cold War novelist.

Alan Furst

Let me put it this way: I don't plan to retire. What would I do, become a brain surgeon? I mean, a brain surgeon can retire and write novels, but a novelist can't retire and do brain surgery - or at least he better not.

Alan Furst

I just became what I call an 'anti-fascist novelist.' There is no word that covers both the fascists and the Communists, which mean different things to people, but of course they're the same: they're tyranny states.

Alan Furst

I was going to be the best failed novelist in Paris. That was certainly not the worst thing in the world that one could be.

Alan Furst

I resist when someone calls me a novelist: it implies some kind of inherent superiority of the novel. I'm not a novelist, I'm a writer.

Aleksandar Hemon

For a spy novelist like me, the Edward J. Snowden story has everything. A man driven by ego and idealism - can anyone ever distinguish the two? - leaves his job and his beautiful girlfriend behind. He must tell the world the Panopticon has arrived. His masters vow to punish him, and he heads for Moscow in a desperate search for refuge.

Alex Berenson

I didn't intend to be a novelist. I didn't intend to be anything. I thought I'd be a journalist.

Alex Garland