Edith Wharton Quotes

I'm not interested in cutting the feet off my characters or stretching them to make them fit my certain political view.

A good novel is a good novel, pointe finale. And I think what I'm writing is exactly that.

George Orwell is half journalist, half fiction writer. I'm 100 percent fiction writer... I don't want to write messages. I want to write good stories. I think of myself as a political person, but I don't state my political messages to anybody.

A good novel doesn't just transcend the boundaries of its target market - it knows nothing about target markets.

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

You're not going to make Hemingway better by adding animations.

The novel is a highly corrupt medium, after all - in the end the vast majority of them simply aren't that great, and are destined to be forgotten.

I'll take any story if it's good.

Size has nothing to do with literature. All legs are long enough to touch the ground, and all books are big enough to fill their covers.

A novel that features real people is complicated, but in the end, that extra challenge is all for the good.

I have an editor in my head, that's why I can't read Harry Potter, because Rowling is such a lousy writer.

For the critic, the author does not exist; only a certain number of writings exist.

I attempt to write a good novel. Whether it is literature or not is something that will be decided by the ages, not by me and not by a pack of critics around the globe.

A. S. Byatt is a writer in mid-career whose time has certainly come, because 'Possession' is a tour de force that opens every narrative device of English fiction to inspection without, for a moment, ceasing to delight.

What does Sinclair know about anything? He's just a writer.

It's never easy to adapt a book, especially as the author, because it's as if you're chopping off appendages. It really feels painful to decide what has to go.

To my ear, the term 'comic novelist' is as redundant and off-putting as the term 'literary novelist'.

To you I am neither man nor woman. I come before you as an author only. It is the sole standard by which you have a right to judge me—the sole ground on which I accept your judgment.

I don't think I could write a book that had an ideological plan going in - I think that would be a terrible book.

There's no literary merit in my books.

Women writers are often conflated with their narrators - as if we can't consciously construct fictional worlds from the ground up and can only write diary entries.

I don't like a lot of what's published as hard SF. Much of it is right-wing, reactionary crap.

The quality I appreciated most about Grafton was her loyalty. She stuck with 'Kinsey Millhone' and the alphabet series conceit for her entire career but did not allow herself to stagnate as a writer. Kinsey's first-person narrative gradually made room for other, third-person perspectives.

A short-story collection is harder to formulate pithy sentences about.

Novelists do not swing on the same pendulums as critics.