A Quote by Harlan Coben

That's what a good crime novelist - any good novelist - should do with you: play with your perceptions while showing you everything in plain sight.

Harlan Coben

Quote Topics

Any Crime Everything Good Novelist Perceptions Plain Plain Sight Play Should Showing Sight While Your

Quote Author

Harlan Coben
American - Author
Born: January 4, 1962

Many novelists say, "I'm not a political novelist" - myself included. That's a standard, even a default position. Whereas that divide between art and politics simply isn't possible in many countries. In Hungary, you couldn't be a fiction writer and then, when asked about politics, put your hands up in the air and say "But I'm not a political novelist." If you're a Chinese novelist, a novelist in a country where censorship is such an issue, how do you claim that politics has nothing to do with your writing? It's in your writing, it's shaping your words.

Katie Kitamura

There was never a good biography of a good novelist. There couldn't be. He is too many people if he's any good.

F. Scott Fitzgerald

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

Today the crime novelist has one advantage denied to writers of 'straight' or 'literary' novels. Unlike them he can range over all levels of society, for crime can easily breach the barriers that exist in our stratified society. Because of these barriers the modern literary novel, unlike its 19th-century predecessors, is often confined to the horizontal, dealing only with one class. But crime runs through society from top to bottom, and so the crime novelist can present a fuller picture of the way we live now.

Allan Massie

All novels are about crime. You'd be hard pressed to find any novel that does not have an element of crime. I don't see myself as a crime novelist, but there are crimes in my books. That's the nature of storytelling, if you want to reflect the real world.

Carl Hiaasen

We may, without offending any laws of good taste, require of an architect, as we do of a novelist, that he should be not only correct, but entertaining.

John Ruskin

I don't know Beyoncé, but I have the impression that she's sincere, that she really is a feminist and wanted to put the word out there to make it a good word in a big way by putting it in big letters on the stage, and especially because she was quoting the African novelist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie who said, "We should all be feminists." She's a very accomplished and important novelist.

Gloria Steinem

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

I was twenty-nine years old and I wasn't a very good poet and I wasn't a very good novelist, [so] I thought I would try writing a play, which seems to have worked out a little better.

Edward Albee

I realized that my identity as a novelist was private. Only I knew how much of a novelist I was!

Alexander Chee

I like to think of myself as an unmediated novelist - or perhaps a national novelist.

E. L. Doctorow

Rules such as "Write what you know," and "Show, don't tell," while doubtlessly grounded in good sense, can be ignored with impunity by any novelist nimble enough to get away with it. There is, in fact, only one rule in writing fiction: Whatever works, works.