Novelist Quotes

Most novels I come across have all the excitement of a long trip on a bus with a sensitive glee club. Yammer and chat.

Love and despair go hand in hand.

I'll tell you why I like writing: it's just jumping into a pool. I get myself into a kind of trance. I engage the world, but it's also wonderful to just escape. I try to find the purities out of the confusion. It's pretty old-fashioned, but it's fun.

I was always kind of florid. And full of rhetoric. That was my flaw. My whole time writing, I've had to work against that because it can be a wrecking posture.

I wanted very much to be Miles Davis when I was a boy, but without the practice. It just looked like an endless road.

I lost my second marriage because of drinking, and I loved the woman very much. But I thought I needed booze to write. I'm glad I was disabused.

I grew up when people seemed actually to be hurting themselves for their art. Of course, some of it was phony.

I found out about reviews early on. They're mostly written by sad men on bad afternoons. That's probably why I'm less angry than some writers, who are so narcissistic they consider every line of every review, even a thoughtful one, as major treason.

I don't write under the ghost of Faulkner. I live in the same town and find his life and work inspiring, but that's it. I have a motorcycle and tool along the country lanes. I travel at my own speed.

I distrust thought. The interior life is highly overrated. I don't like the wispy and the vague... or inductive logic in any kind of writing. I'm impatient with writers who make too much sense. The better things that I've done have come to me by instinct.

A man's got to do what a man's got to do. A woman must do what he can't.

Voice comes to you through a spell, a trance. The best voices are not you... they're a little away from you.

If a nation loses its storytellers, it loses its childhood.

Roots is not just a saga of my family. It is the symbolic saga of a people.

When you start about family, about lineage and ancestry, you are talking about every person on earth.

Anytime you see a turtle up on top of a fence post, you know he had some help.

My fondest hope is that 'Roots' may start black, white, brown, red, yellow people digging back for their own roots. Man, that would make me feel 90 feet tall.

I look at my books the way parents look at their children. The fact that one becomes more successful than the others doesn't make me love the less successful one any less.

Racism is taught in our society, it is not automatic. It is learned behavior toward persons with dissimilar physical characteristics.

Nobody can do for little children what grandparents do. Grandparents sort of sprinkle stardust over the lives of little children.

In my writing, as much as I could, I tried to find the good, and praise it.

Either you deal with what is the reality, or you can be sure that the reality is going to deal with you.

In every conceivable manner, the family is link to our past, bridge to our future.

When I began writing that I was able and did travel and met some fascinating people and also uncovered some history, which has not been discovered before.

There I was, an 18-year-old mimic rooming with a blind whistler.

The president of General Motors was in a foul humor.

Long afterward, many would remember those two days in the first week of October with vividness and anguish.

I set myself 600 words a day as a minimum output, regardless of the weather, my state of mind or if I'm sick or well. There must be 600 finished words-not almost right words.

I don't think I really invented anybody. I have drawn on real life.

I loved education, and, yes, I did want to go on learning.