A. A. Gill
A. A. Gill

I tell you, once a girl's got a dose of novels she's a pushover for iambic pentameter.

A. B. Yehoshua
A. B. Yehoshua

I deeply respect literature and expect to gain insight from a book and to identify emotionally with its characters. I therefore avoid reading suspense novels or science fiction.

A. B. Yehoshua
A. B. Yehoshua

I only published my first novel at the age of 40. Till then, I wrote short stories.

A. N. Wilson
A. N. Wilson

Iris Murdoch did influence my early novels very much, and influence is never entirely good.

A. N. Wilson
A. N. Wilson

I don't think you can tell the objective truth about a person. That's why people write novels.

A. Scott Berg
A. Scott Berg

I developed a mania for Fitzgerald - by the time I'd graduated from high school I'd read everything he'd written. I started with 'The Great Gatsby' and moved on to 'Tender Is the Night,' which just swept me away. Then I read 'This Side of Paradise,' his novel about Princeton - I literally slept with that book under my pillow for two years.

A. S. Byatt
A. S. Byatt

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
A. S. Byatt

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

A. S. Byatt
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
A. S. Byatt

In novels in general - and also on the television - we do live in a world where bodies is what we are. We do not talk about the spirit or the soul, and there is a sense that we no longer talk about beliefs, either Freudian or Marxist.