Novel Quotes
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The reason I shift gears constantly, why I'm doing an opera, why I've done essays, why I've written poetry for years that nobody wanted, why I do short stories and novels and screenplays... is so I will have new ways of failing. This means becoming a student again.
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Writing a story or a novel is one way of discovering sequence in experience, of stumbling upon cause and effect in the happenings of a writer's own life.
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I love to tell stories. I love to tell stories the way I tell them, not the way anybody else tells them. I am all the time writing a novel.
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Hollywood called just as I crested thirty. My novels did not and still do not interest them, but my writing ability did.
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I'm skeptical that the novel will be 're-invented.'
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A novel is an impression, not an argument; and there the matter must rest.
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Facebook is the novel we are all writing
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I could get a better education interviewing John Steinbeck than talking to an English professor about novels.
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I always try to create conflict and drama in my books; it's the engine of the novel.
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Baltimore was never intended to be anything other than this original novel that Chris Golden and I did together. There was never any thought of this thing going on and becoming a series. If there's any common thing between these characters, it's that they weren't anything I was seeing in comics. Almost everything I've done is something I wish somebody else was doing, because it's what I'd like to read.
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I don't think the 'what' distinguishes a good novel from a bad one but rather the 'how.'
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I think people feel for a long time that they ought to know how to write a novel in two drafts.
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Usually, ordinary histories don't get the emotional feel of a period. That's what a novel can do.
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My novels are often about people who are in love or attracted to each other.
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The historical background is one of the easier aspects of writing a novel. Far more difficult is dreaming up the smaller, character-based scenes, scenes that rise entirely from one's own imagination.
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I'd like to emphasize that when a reader finishes a great novel, he will immediately begin looking for another. If someone loves your book, it increases the chance that he or she will look at mine. So there is no competition between writers. Another writer's success helps build a larger readership for all of us.
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You can write a short story in two hours. Two hours a day, you have a novel in a year
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You have the older generation like Iris Murdoch and Angus Wilson who are not as old as Graham Greene, but still are coming on. I dare say anyone who knew the scene better than I know it could fill it in with a very satisfactory supply of novels.
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For me, writing a novel is like having a dream. Writing a novel lets me intentionally dream while I'm still awake. I can continue yesterday's dream today, something you can't normally do in everyday life.
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On an island, anything can happen. In a crime novel, it usually does.
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I wasn't aware I'd write the novel when I wrote the New Yorker story either. And the narration of their construction in 10:04 is fiction, however flickering.
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Writing a novel is like childbirth: once you realize how awful it really is, you never want to do it again.
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I suppose I started writing seriously at 16 years old. I thought I wrote a novel at 16 and sent it to New York! They sent it back because it wasn't novel.
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I've seen novels that have grown out of one story in a collection. But it hasn't occurred to me to take any of those stories and build on them. They seem very finished for me, so I don't feel like going back and dredging them up.
