I saw novelists as being admirable people and I thought... I thought... maybe, one day, I could be one of them.

- Michael Palin

Anthony Powell was the most European of 20th-century British novelists.

- Tariq Ali

Most novelists write about twisted lives.

- Tom Robbins

Basically, all novelists should want to tell a story, and if they don't want to, they shouldn't be novelists. I think story-telling is important and underrated.

- Susan Howatch

Sometimes I think that novelists suffer from P.C.S.: Perpetual Childhood Syndrome.

- Simon Mawer

America may have great poets and novelists, but she never will have more than one necromancer.

- Rebecca Harding Davis

The novel is just fine: It's novelists who aren't doing so well.

- Russell Smith

There are some novelists who can get away with writing about sex - Philip Roth, Ian McEwan - but they are rare.

- Ruth Rendell

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.

- Quentin Tarantino

All novelists write in a different way, but I always write in longhand and then do two versions of typescript on a computer.

- Martin Amis

The bicycle, the bicycle surely, should always be the vehicle of novelists and poets.

- Christopher Morley

Once upon a time, novelists of the 19th century, such as Charles Dickens, published in serial form.

- Margaret Atwood

I like novelists who can create other interesting worlds.

- Kazuo Ishiguro

There are many reasons why novelists write, but they all have one thing in common - a need to create an alternative world.

- John Fowles

The novel is resilient, and so are novelists.

- John Banville

Novelists are always resisting autobiographical readings of their work, because they know how false those can be.

- Jeffrey Eugenides

Crime novelists do really well with Los Angeles.

- Janet Fitch

Novelists should be like scientists, dissecting the cadaver.

- J. G. Ballard

You could say that all novels are spy novels and all novelists are spy masters.

- Ian Mcewan