A Quote by James M. Barrie

The best of our fiction is by novelists who allow that it is as good as they can give, and the worst by novelists who maintain that they could do much better if only the public would let them.

James M. Barrie

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Allow Best Better Could Fiction Give Good Maintain Much Novelists Only Our Public Them Worst Would

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James M. Barrie
British - Novelist
May 9, 1860 - June 19, 1937

For me, film has been good because I'm able to work at top crack, working at something I love to do, in the only literary form in which you can still make money. There are no famous novelists, not as novelists used to be famous.

William Monahan

No novelists any good except me. Sovietski -- yah! Nastikoff -- bah! I spit me of zem all. No novelists anywhere any good except me. P. G. Wodehouse and Tolstoi not bad. Not good, but not bad. No novelists any good except me.

P. G. Wodehouse

I think I belong to America's last generation of novelists. Novelists will come one by one from now on, not in seeming families, and will perhaps write only one or two novels, and let it go at that.

Kurt Vonnegut

Dreaming is the day job of novelists, but sharing our dreams is a still more important task for us. We cannot be novelists without this sense of sharing something.

Haruki Murakami

If you want to understand human beings, there are plenty of people to go to besides psychologists.... Most of these people are incapable of communicating their knowledge, but those who can communicate it are novelists. They are good novelists precisely because they are good psychologists.

Anthony Standen

Great novelists are philosopher novelists - that is, the contrary of thesis-writers.

Albert Camus

A petty reason perhaps why novelists more and more try to keep a distance from journalists is that novelists are trying to write the truth and journalists are trying to write fiction.

Graham Greene

Wanting to know all kinds of things is perfect for novelists, because novelists are generalists. We're not specialists in anything, except, hopefully, writing.

Lynne Tillman

It may be time for serious literary novelists to take back some of the subject matter we abandoned to hack novelists and the movies.

Scott Spencer

Some novelists are luckier than others in the eras of their formative intellectual years, but all Weltanschauungs return, which means that most novelists have at least a chance of a revival.

Jane Smiley

Not all popular novelists are good, but all good novelists are, sooner or later, popular.

Dean Koontz

I've known several spies who have wanted to become novelists. And novelists who became spies, of course.

Christopher Koch

I really think more fledgling novelists - and many current and even established novelists - should get out into the real world and cover local politics, sports, culture, and crime and write it up on deadline.

C. J. Box

Science fiction is not predictive; it is descriptive.... Prediction is the business of prophets, clairvoyants, and futurologists. It is not the business of novelists. A novelist's business is lying.... Open your eyes; listen, listen. That is what the novelists say. But they don't tell you what you will see and hear. All they can tell you is what they have seen and heard, in their time in this world, a third of it spent in sleep and dreaming, another third of it spent in telling lies.

Ursula K. Le Guin

There is not now, nor I suspect will there ever be, a le Carre novel with ninjas in it. Most serious novelists are wary of including ninjas in their writing. That's a shame, because many much-admired works of modern fiction could benefit from a few.

Nick Harkaway

Of all the hot liquors, I regard buttered rum as the worst. I believe that the drinking of it should be permitted only in the "Northwest Passage" and, even there, only by highly imaginative and overenthusiastic novelists.

David A. Embury

A Quote by James M. Barrie

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