A first building is like a first novel, it is always autobiographical.
Sometimes writing a novel is not unlike having a baby. You’d have to ask a female novelist to compare the pain.
What ‘War and Peace’ is to the novel and ‘Hamlet’ is to the theater, Swan Lake’ is to ballet – that is, the name which to many people stands for and sums up an art form.
When writing a novel a writer should create living people; people not characters. A character is a caricature.
While working on my first five books, I kept wishing I was writing a novel. I thought until you wrote a novel, you weren’t taken seriously as a writer. It used to trouble me a lot, but nothing troubles me now, and besides, there has been a change. I think short stories are taken more seriously now than they were.
When I feel like being a director, I write a novel.
No matter how ephemeral it is, a novel is something, while despair is nothing.
Be the responsibility on their heads who raise this novel and extraordinary question of reception, going to the unconstitutional abridgment, as I conceive, of the great right of petition inherent in the People of the United States.
Living in an entirely different physical as well as biotic environment, such a population would have unique opportunities to enter new niches and to select novel adaptive pathways.
I’ve written short stories in first person, but you have so much more control writing in third person. Third person, you know what everybody’s thinking. First person is very limiting, and I could never sustain a first person novel before.
When technology is ready for something novel, when the components needed to build something new become affordable, it is going to be done by someone and more likely by several people.
We have learned in recent years to translate almost all of political life in terms of conspiracy. And the spy novel, as never before, really, has come into its own.
And the nice thing about writing a novel is you take your time, you sit with the character sometimes nine years, you look very deeply at a situation, unlike in real life when we just kind of snap something out.
I resist when someone calls me a novelist: it implies some kind of inherent superiority of the novel. I’m not a novelist, I’m a writer.
I may attempt a novel. I think that no matter what you write, it requires being honest with oneself, and you have to pull yourself out of the whirlwind of daily life.
The Little Friend is a long book. It’s also completely different from my first novel: different landscape, different characters, different use of language and diction, different approach to story.
It took me a long time to know enough about writing to really write short stories. You can’t just immerse yourself, as you do in a novel, and see where everything goes. Novels are a very flexible, accommodating form. Short stories aren’t.
Most English writers are not interested in change but in the social novel. That demands a static backdrop. I’m intensely interested in change – probably as a matter of self-preservation. What the hell is going to happen next?
It’s only a drawback in the States, where most people seem to have no real interest in other countries and the notion of a novel which might offer insight into life in the UK doesn’t seem to appeal very widely.
I love Richard Yates, his work, and the novel, Revolutionary Road. It’s a devastating novel.
It takes a lot of energy and a lot of neurosis to write a novel. If you were really sensible, you’d do something else.
Every decade of my life I attempted to write a novel. But I had nothing to say. I was far too self-absorbed, and now I realize I was writing for others, so that they’d applaud me, see my genius, tell me how wonderful I am, or be jealous of my success.
I didn’t feel the need for anonymous affection, for people in the dark applauding. To me, it would be like writing a novel and then getting up every night and reading your novel.
I wanted to write a novel where the meaning is in the story and characters and the subliminal, in the shades and nuances. It’s exciting to develop that as a writer.
The story of ‘A Dog’s Purpose’ flowed into me a set piece. The entire book was just there, as if I were connected to a streaming service, a novel wholly formed of character and plot. This has never happened to me before or since. I prayed for help and I got it. A gift.
My first novel, ‘When You Were Mine,’ was a very, very personal story and drew a lot on the people in my life and the relationships that I had.
Jill Eisenstadt’s comic second novel, ‘Kiss Out,’ is a work of such extravagant wackiness, eccentricity, and exuberance that any attempt to squeeze it into the confines of a simple plot summary seems doomed to failure and is possibly pointless.
No matter how daring or cautious you may choose to be, in the course of your life, you are bound to come into direct physical contact with what’s known as Evil. I mean here not a property of the gothic novel but, to say the least, a palpable social reality that you in no way can control.
The fire burns as the novel taught it how.
It’s true that at the time I was fond of Kurt Vonnegut and Richard Brautigan, and it was from them that I learned about this kind of simple, swift-paced style, but the main reason for the style of my first novel is that I simply did not have the time to write sustained prose.
You don’t sit up in a cave and write the Great American Novel and know it is utterly superb, and then throw it page by page into the fire. You just don’t do that. You send it out. You have to send it out.
The suspense of a novel is not only in the reader, but in the novelist, who is intensely curious about what will happen to the hero.
I have no favourite genre or style but treat each novel with the same care, imagination and craftsmanship. It’s as difficult to write a crime or a children’s novel with a touch of style and grace as it is a literary novel.
When I start getting close to the end of a novel, something registers in the back of my mind for the next novel, so that I usually don’t write, or take notes. And I certainly don’t begin. I just allow things to percolate for a while.
‘The One-Eyed Man’ is a novel that was one I never intended to write.
My first novel, ‘The Tiger’s Daughter,’ embodies the loneliness I felt but could not acknowledge, even to myself, as I negotiated the no man’s land between the country of my past and the continent of my present.
Don’t force yourself to write. Some people can write a novel in a few months, whereas for others it can take over a year. I’m lucky to be one of the former – but, even so, if I’m not in the mood to write, I won’t. I’ll go off, do something else and come back to it when I’m ready.
There are many oral historians in America, but my books are made using the rules of novel writing. I have a beginning, a plot, characters.
To sing a song is quite different than to write a poem. I’m not and never will be a novelist, but to write a novel is not the same thing as writing a play. There is a difference in form, but essentially what you’re after is the same thing.
I am a businessman at the end of the day. I have grown up with Excel sheets. I start out writing my novel with spreadsheets and the milestones in each chapter highlighted.
I understand the visual media very well, as I used to write comic books for Walt Disney, and I’ve written a graphic novel. How you carry a story in pictures is different than how you do it in text.
An economy open to new concepts and novel ventures is bound to generate unequal gains.
You want to suggest something new, but at the same time, resolve the drama of the action in the novel.
The novel, for me, was an accident. I really don’t consider myself a novelist.
In the West, audiences think I am a stereotyped action star, or that I always play hitmen or killers. But in Hong Kong, I did a lot of comedy, many dramatic films, and most of all, romantic roles, lots of love stories. I was like a romance novel hero.
When you write a movie, you have a hundred collaborators. But when you write a novel, it’s yours.
Every novel generates its own climate, when you get going.
Although when I start a novel I know how it will begin and end, I like to let the people within the story take me on a journey between those points without having a fixed plan.
That seems to be the definition of ‘novel’ for me: a story that hasn’t yet discovered a way to be brief.
I’ve always enjoyed that kind of thing – thinking about the production of narrative and why it is that when we read a novel, we don’t notice the fact that someone who might be very close-mouthed or tight-lipped is perfectly willing to tell us a story in 600 or 700 pages.
I don’t like going out. I hate clubs. I hate being around too many people. I love my home and staying in bed and watching ‘Dancing With the Stars’ or reading a Danielle Steel novel.
It’s my own personal unconscious that ultimately creates the novel’s aesthetic facade.
The decision to use a pen name was nothing more than a desire to compartmentalise my life. However, I had not thought about an appropriate pseudonym, and since there’s an abundance of anagrams in the novel, the idea struck me: why not use an anagram of my name? Hence, Shawn Haigins.
