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

Asking the author of historical novels to teach you about history is like expecting the composer of a melody to provide answers about radio transmission.

Love is more pleasant than marriage for the same reason that novels are more amusing than history.

Historian: an unsuccessful novelist.

There is no happiness in love except at the end of an English novel.

I always seem to get inspiration and renewed vitality by contact with this great novel land of yours which sticks up out of the Atlantic.

I wrote a novel for my degree and I'm very happy I didn't submit that to a publisher. I sympathize with my professors who had to read it.

A good novel tells us the truth about its hero but a bad novel tells us the truth about its author.

It's with bad sentiments that one makes good novels.

The person be it gentleman or lady who has not pleasure in a good novel must be intolerably stupid.

Life is God's novel. Let him write it.

I grow plants for many reasons: to please my eye or to please my soul to challenge the elements or to challenge my patience for novelty or for nostalgia but mostly for the joy in seeing them grow.

I believe in a funny way the job of the novelist is to be out there on the fringes and speaking for an experience that has not really been spoken for.

I actually find novels that are determined to be funny at every turn quite oppressive.

Great big serious novels always get awards. If it's a battle between a great big serious novel and a funny novel the funny novel is doomed.

Novelists have always had complete freedom to pretty much tell their story any way they saw fit. And that's what I'm trying to do.

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