A Quote by Don DeLillo

You become a serious novelist by living long enough.

Don DeLillo

Quote Topics

Become Enough Living Living Long Long Novelist Serious

Quote Author

Don DeLillo
American - Novelist
Born: November 20, 1936

When I was 30 or so - by that time I had become an assistant D.A. - I decided I would try to write a novel. To be clear: I did not decide to become a novelist. Honestly, it never crossed my mind that I could actually earn a living as a professional novelist.

William Landay

I want to be a popular novelist who's also serious, or a serious novelist who's also very accessible.

Douglas Kennedy

It's true that some of us become better writers by living long enough. But this is also how we become worse writers. The trick is to die in between.

Don DeLillo

As long as I'm living, I'm always going to try and become and get to whatever is next. Even when I become this one thing, when I get there, I'm going to try and become something else. As human beings, as long as we're alive, we're forever becoming.

Stacy Barthe

I am a born novelist, which does not happen all that often. There are people who try to write for a certain time, then they become Ministers of Culture under de Gaulle, and they begin living their own fictions.

Gore Vidal

I just I love telling stories and as long as I can make my living doing that in all the different mediums that I have been lucky enough to, that's enough for me.

John Buffalo Mailer

Life was resumed, and anxious living blew away as if it had not been. I could not breathe deep enough or long enough. It was a return to happiness.

Sarah Orne Jewett

Neither is life long enough for friendship. That is a serious and majestic affair.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

I had, like any other young novelist, started out by believing the difficult thing was to get published and that, once you managed that, well, your financial problems were over. I discovered, like any other serious novelist, that actually they had only just begun.

Mordecai Richler

If I die, I know the news item would be, 'Partner of Ricky Gervais and novelist dies.' That would come first. But I've come to terms with it. As long as they do still add the 'and novelist,' that will be fine.

Jane Fallon

So much working, reading, thinking, living to do. A lifetime is not long enough. Nor youth to old age long enough. Immortality and permanence be damned. Sure I want them, but they are nonexistent, and won't matter when I rot underground. All I want to say is: I made the best of a mediocre job. It was a good fight while it lasted. And so life goes.

Sylvia Plath

I'm a novelist, and I'm a woman, and I'm considered to be a serious author whether I like it or not.

Tawni O'Dell

Sigmund Freud was a novelist with a scientific background. He just didn't know he was a novelist. All those damn psychiatrists after him, they didn't know he was a novelist either.

John Irving

If a person is not talented enough to be a novelist, not smart enough to be a lawyer, and his hands are too shaky to perform operations, he becomes a journalist.

Norman Mailer

No need for confusion, my dear Mulgrave... Beautiful wine and sour vinegar come from exactly the same source. Curiously if one leaves a bottle of wine open for long enough it will become vinegar. Happily in this house wine never survives long enough to go bad.