I saw novelists as being admirable people and I thought… I thought… maybe, one day, I could be one of them.
I cling to the basic set of tenets laid out in Tom Wolfe’s ‘New Journalism’ – to get out there like the great French novelists of the 19th century and study life. I am a Tom Wolfe fan of the first order.
Some Pulitzer winners – novelists – have confided to me that getting the prize screwed them up. It messed with their heads. That hasn’t been my experience.
I’ve known several spies who have wanted to become novelists. And novelists who became spies, of course.
One decision I made in writing ‘Henry and Clara’ was that I would keep Lincoln’s appearances and any dialogue by him to an absolute minimum, because I think readers don’t quite believe it when novelists have Lincoln walking around and saying things. They just know they’re in the presence of stage machinery.
Even if I couldn’t get my early novels published, I could still write. I went into newspapers, where I got paid to write every day. If there’s a better school for would-be novelists, I don’t know what it is.
Anthony Powell was the most European of 20th-century British novelists.
History is the history of human behavior, and human behavior is the raw material of fiction. Most people recognize that novelists do research to get the facts right – how a glove factory works, for example, or how courtesans in imperial Japan dressed.
If you need proof of how the oral relates to the written, consider that many great novelists, including Joyce and Hemingway, never submitted a piece of work without reading it aloud.
I cannot and do not live in the world of discretion, not as a writer, anyway. I would prefer to, I assure you – it would make life easier. But discretion is, unfortunately, not for novelists.
There are so many new young poets, novelists, and playwrights who are much less politically committed than the former generations. The trend is to be totally concentrated on the literary aesthetic and to consider politics to be something dirty that shouldn’t be mixed with an artistic or a literary vocation.
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.
We sometimes forget that human invention can also be a subject of human invention: that might seem a modern notion, or a postmodern one, but novelists have taken time – sometimes time out from their realist fixations – to source and satirise the speech and power we rely on.
Independent graphic novelists have already achieved good work in terms of design, but all these great minds are writing in English. There is a need for people to write in Hindi.
I started writing short fiction very briefly, as I imagine is the case for some novelists.
Historians tell the story of the past, novelists the story of the present.
Novelists get to say plenty in their massive tomes; rock singers only get four-minute songs with two verses and a chorus’ worth of lyrics, and so there’s a real pleasure in accessing the intelligence behind the music, even if it doesn’t qualify as ‘great literature.’
James Salter has talents on the page we novelists would sell souls to the devil for.
Novelists lie for a living – what is a novel, after all, but an assembly of fibs paradoxically meant to illustrate something true? – but generally see a distinction between lying on the page and lying off it.
I’m inspired by playwrights, novelists, poets: The value of language has been a lifelong passion of mine. I enjoy it. I’m good at it.
Here’s a secret. Many novelists, if they are pressed and if they are being honest, will admit that the finished book is a rather rough translation of the book they’d intended to write.
Somehow we must reintegrate the scientific with the popular and reconnect the future to the present. This is less a job for scientists, engineers, bureaucrats, and administrators and more a job for novelists, moviemakers, popularizers, and politicians.
We want a world with both historians and novelists, don’t we? Not with one or the other. Every fiction writer crosses the line that divides artistry and documentation – or erases it.
Novelists are too often assumed to write veiled autobiography.
For novelists, sharply drawn moral conflicts are often useful, and even human and personal disasters can be seen as material.
All novelists must form their personal pacts in some way with the slowness of their craft. There are some who demand of themselves a ‘rate of production,’ for whom it’s a matter of pride to complete, say, a book every year.
In the 1930s, all the novelists had seemed to be people who came blazing up into stardom from out of total obscurity. That seemed to be the nature of the beast. The biographical notes on the dustjackets of the novels were terrific.
Many first-time novelists end up rewriting their first two or three chapters, trying to get them ‘just right.’ But the point of the first draft is not to get it right; it’s to get it written – so that you’ll have something to work with.
I meet kids now who become novelists, poets, write for the theater and movies, who were simply inspired by what they saw during the Spoleto Festival.
Novelists have to be adept at controlling the flow of information, and, most crucially, they have to be in charge of the narrative.
Thriller novelists get asked – berated, sometimes – about whether their work glorifies bad behavior, even, exploits human tragedy for entertainment.
Once upon a time, novelists of the 19th century, such as Charles Dickens, published in serial form.
In a certain way, novelists become unacknowledged historians, because we talk about small, tiny, little anonymous moments that won’t necessarily make it into the history books.
My grandmother’s first husband was a spiritualist medium. What fascinates me about that is the balance between conviction and sincerity and trickery, which is also something that novelists are very familiar with.
Kingsley Amis was one of a trio of brilliant comic novelists who made English literature sparkle in the twentieth century.
For novelists, the imagination is everything. The trick is to guide one’s imagination using research. I love using old maps. When I wrote my novels on London and New York, I found wonderful historical atlases. Paris has the most lavish maps of all.
I think it would be bad to a truly successful celebrity person, because I know these novelists where people get a cult following, and they have some strange personal attachment to them because it’s so personal to read a book.
Many novelists take well-defined, precise characters, whose stories are sometimes of mediocre interest, and place them in an important historical context, which remains secondary in spite of everything.
I’ve always played that edge of fact and fiction. I used to be a filmmaker, and certainly in film that’s a line that filmmakers cross more readily and more easily than novelists.
It used to be that the highest ambition of American novelists was to write ‘the Great American Novel,’ that great white whale of American fiction that would encompass all the American experience in one great book.
Stories in which the destruction of society occurs are explorations of social fears and issues that filmmakers, novelists, playwrights, painters have been examining for a long time.
The light that radiates from the great novels time can never dim, for human existence is perpetually being forgotten by man and thus the novelists’ discoveries, however old they may be, will never cease to astonish.
Noir was a brainchild of the United States. And most of the creators of classic noir – novelists and screenwriters, directors and cameramen – were men. Women were their mysterious, sometimes villainous, always seductive objects of desire.
Alternate history fascinates me, as it fascinates all novelists, because ‘What if?’ is the big thing.
Latin America seemed to be a land where there were only dictators, revolutionaries, catastrophes. Now we know that Latin America can produce also artists, musicians, painters, thinkers, and novelists.
Of course all novelists are egomaniacs and want to draw everyone to their fold just like any other preacher. The snake-oil peddler, the false prophet, all of this is fascinating to me. But I certainly hope that I’m more humane than that.
I came to feel that, in addition to Imre Kertesz, Hungary has produced at least three contemporary novelists who deserve the Nobel: Peter Nadas, Peter Esterhazy and Laszlo Krasznahorkai.
It seemed to me you could do anything in comics. So I started doing my thing, which is mainly influenced by novelists, stand-up comedians, that sort of thing.
Novelists are always resisting autobiographical readings of their work, because they know how false those can be.
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