Jodi Picoult Quotes

When people write a novel, they want to have that reach and that impact. To get it with a first novel, you can either see it as an albatross or a calling card.

It's quite humbling when you see the list of writers who have been president of PEN and you know some of the things they've done.

I don't think you can ever assess your work. I don't think Turgenev could assess his any more than I can assess mine, and his didn't have a social impact as much as great literary impact.

I'm not one of those writers that sits worrying about posthumous fame.

Saul Bellow never took my advice when he was my friend.

The impact of any particular writer on your own work is hard to discern.

Whenever anyone calls me 'The new J..K. Rowling,' I think, 'What's wrong with the old one?'

I shall not be satisfied unless I produce something which shall for a few days supersede the last fashionable novel on the tables of young ladies.

It's been said that I am the most widely read writer of the 20th century. The number of books I've sold runs into untold millions.

A book is sent out into the world, and there is no way of fully anticipating the responses it will elicit. Consider the responses called forth by the Bible, Homer, Shakespeare - let alone contemporary poetry or a modern novel.

Every writer secretly hopes that what he or she has written will endure.

I want to leave behind a literary legacy.

I've come to think of Dunnett as the literary equivalent of the Velvet Underground; Not many people bought the books, but everyone who did wrote a novel.

When your Dad was the creator of 'Moby Dick' you kind of steer clear of getting compared in a solo-ing aspect.

Shakespeare, Butler and Bacon have rendered it extremely difficult for all who come after them to be sublime, witty or profound.

Thackeray and Balzac will make it possible for our descendants to live over again the England and France of to-day. Seen in this light, the novelist has a higher office than merely and amuse his contemporaries.

'Invisible Man' holds such an honored place in African-American literature that Ralph Ellison didn't have to write anything else to break bread with the remembered dead. But he did try to go on, because if a writer has done one great thing, then the pressures to do another are intense.

Gore Vidal was a man of immense literary talent, some of which he used well, some of which he wasted.

A few of Ellison's short stories from the 1940s and 1950s were widely anthologized over the years. After a while, it became generally known that he was at work on another novel. Though he remained aware ever afterward of the authority 'Invisible Man' gave to him, no second novel followed his brilliant debut in 1952.

Great writers leave us not just their works, but a way of looking at things.

There is only one positive role of the Nobel prize--it creates some common way to understand a writer. I cannot say, that I like this situation, but that's the way it goes. The books are being born and then walk around the world, just as children do.

"Do you know," Ivan Bunin recalls Anton Chekhov saying to him in 1899, near the end of his too-short life, "for how many years I shall be read? Seven." "Why seven?" Bunin asked. "Well," Chekhov answered, "seven and a half then."

The best novelist of my generation is an Italian living in Paris, still working and improving - Italo Calvino.

I've written 17 novels, and I've found out that fiction can't keep up with real life.

Jerome Charyn is one of the most important writers in American literature and one of only three now writing whose work makes me truly happy to be a reader.