Novelist Quotes

I want an ending that's satisfying. I'm more of a classical writer than a modernist one in that I want the ending to be coherent and feel like an ending. I don't like when it just seems to putter out. I mean, life is chaotic enough.

I think it is important to remind people of the extent of our free will.

The daily act of writing remains as demanding and maddening as it was before, and the pleasure you get from writing - rare but profound - remains at the true heart of the enterprise. On their best days, writers all over the world are winning Pulitzers, all alone in their studios, with no one watchin

I know that attaching memories to books may be going out of the world, but while it lasts, it's a strong record of your life.

You can tell when something's not moving forward anymore. When the doubts you have about it don't go away.

Millions long for immortality who don't know what to do with themselves on a rainy Sunday afternoon.

The first book I wrote was The Bride Price which was a romantic book, but my husband burnt the book when he saw it. I was the typical African woman, I'd done this privately, I wanted him to look at it, approve it and he said he wouldn't read it.

In all my novels, I deal with the many problems and prejudices which exist for Black people in Britain today.

I work toward the liberation of women, but I'm not feminist. I'm just a woman.

I believe it is important to speak to your readers in person... to enable people to have a whole picture of me; I have to both write and speak. I view my role as writer and also as oral communicator.

I always value my large kitchen because it was better to do everything there, you wash up, you do everything, rather than messing up another room and I pop my typewriter just next to it. So I still write now but I was doing more writing when the children were younger.

Black women all over the world should re-unite and re-examine the way history has portrayed us.

A hungry man is an angry one.

The law, in our case, seems to make the right; and the very reverse ought to be done - the right should make the law.

The human heart, at whatever age, opens only to the heart that opens in return.

The bore is usually considered a harmless creature, or of that class of irrationa bipeds who hurt only themselves.

Some people talk of morality, and some of religion, but give me a little snug property.

Our Irish blunders are never blunders of the heart.

I've a great fancy to see my own funeral afore I die.

How success changes the opinion of men!

Fortune's wheel never stands still the highest point is therefore the most perilous.

Business was his aversion; Pleasure was his business.

An orator is the worse person to tell a plain fact.

Surely it is much more generous to forgive and remember, than to forgive and forget.

Every time that I write a novel I am convinced for at least two years that it is the last one, because a novel is like a child. It takes two years after its birth. You have to take care of it. It starts walking, and then speaking.

Every European goes on the streets and sees medieval churches. Not if you live in Indianapolis. The most exciting letters I received were from people in places like that.

Better reality than a dream: if something is real, then it's real and you're not to blame.

As an adolescent I wrote comic books, because I read lots of them, and fantasy novels set in Malaysia and Central Africa.

As a scholar I am interested in the philosophy of language, semiotics, call it what you want, and one of the main features of the human language is the possibility of lying.

After years of practice, I can walk into a bookstore and understand its layout in a few seconds. I can glance at the spine of a book and make a good guess at its content from a number of signs.