The novel moves like all the arts. It’s transforming itself all the time.
Celebrity is absolutely preposterous. Entertainment seems to be inflating. It used to be the punctuation to your life, a film or a novel or a play, a way of celebrating a good week or month. Now it feels as if it’s all punctuation.
I originally wrote ‘The Martian’ as a free serial novel, posting one chapter at a time to my website.
So, I outlined a horror novel and started writing.
I enjoy research; in fact research is so engaging that it would be easy to go on for years, and never write the novel at all.
If you’re reading a mystery novel, you kind of want the character to solve the crime instead of completely bumble their way through it.
‘Lucky Us’ ends with a description of a photograph of the novel’s fictional family. I could never get enough of my own family photo albums.
I hope to read a Harry Potter novel soon, to see what it’s all about. I admit to being annoyed that many good light fantasy writers have had trouble getting published, in England and elsewhere, when it is obvious the readers were waiting for us all along.
I love to read. And right now I’m on my last hundred pages of ‘The Corrections’ by Jonathan Franzen, and I really enjoyed it. His writing is just – he’s one of those writers where you just go, ‘There are people just meant to be novel writers.’
I could not have written a novel if I hadn’t been a journalist first, because it taught me that there’s no muse that’s going to come down and bestow upon you the mood to write. You just have to do it. I’m definitely not precious.
I’ve never yet managed to write a novel which didn’t have an Indian central character.
The novel is a seduction; a reader has to be seduced.
It’s true that immigrant novels have to do with people going from one country to another, but there isn’t a single novel that doesn’t travel from one place to another, emotionally or locally.
I encourage the translators of my books to take as much license as they feel that they need. This is not quite the heroic gesture it might seem, because I’ve learned, from working with translators over the years, that the original novel is, in a way, a translation itself.
Nothing induces me to read a novel except when I have to make money by writing about it. I detest them.
Divorce in a young-adult novel means what being orphaned meant in a fairy tale: vulnerability, danger, unwanted independence.
I’ve read every single fantasy novel there is. I mean, I would challenge a lot of people to read more fantasy novels than I have.
If there was a turning point for me, it was ‘The Bridges at Toko-Ri.’ It is a very fine short novel. But it gave me very little satisfaction. Really. I decided I wasn’t going to go down that avenue.
I think every age has a medium that talks to it more eloquently than the others. In the 19th century it was symphonic music and the novel. For various technical and artistic reasons, film became that eloquent medium for the 20th century.
The first thing I tried to write was a novel, when I took that time off in grad school. Then I didn’t finish it. I went back to school, and then I started writing nonfiction kind of by accident.
I name the genre that I write in as ‘novel of voices.’
I’m not constrained by being a genre writer. Any story I can imagine, I can cast as a fantasy novel and probably get it published.
I’ve never abandoned the novel.
Movies are about people; there’re not about ideas. It’s like great novels. Great novels are not about ideas. There’s never been a great novel about ideas.
Working on a green screen set, yeah, it’s almost like reading from a novel, taking those black words and creating a world around you.
Since I have come to America, I am often asked whether my next novel will be set in America. I don’t think it will. I think I will be living in America for some time to come, but while living in America, I would like to write about Japanese society from the outside.
When one starts writing a book, especially a novel, even the humblest person in the world hopes to become Homer.
Each novel is harder than its predecessor because I must work harder at not repeating myself. However, I enjoy the challenge. This is the greatest job in the world.
Systematic philosophical and practical anti-intellectualism such as we are witnessing appears to be something truly novel in the history of human culture.
After finishing a draft, no matter how rough, I almost always put it aside for a while. It doesn’t matter if it’s a story or a novel, I find that when it’s still fresh in my mind I’m either thoroughly sick of its flaws or completely blind to them. Either way, I’m unable to make substantive edits of any value.
You’re getting everyone’s point of view at the same time, which, for me, is the perfect state for a novel: a cubist state, the cubist novel.
Today, there are more opportunities for writers in terms of access to larger success, but it’s more difficult to publish a literary novel in the lower ranges. In other words, you almost have to hit a home run. You can hit a triple, maybe, but nobody’s interested in a single.
The disappointing second novel is measured against the brilliant first novel – often no novel lives up to the first. Literary improvement seems like an unfair expectation.
All novels attempt to cut neural routes through the brain, to convince us that down this road the true future of the novel lies.
When I complete a novel I set it aside, and begin work on short stories, and eventually another long work. When I complete that novel I return to the earlier novel and rewrite much of it. In the meantime the second novel lies in a desk drawer.
Stories lie deep in our souls. Stories lie so deep at the bottom of our hearts that they can bring people together on the deepest level. When I write a novel, I go into such depths.
I see the poem or the novel ending with an open door.
When ‘Midnight’s Children’ came out, people in the West tended to respond to the fantasy elements in the novel, to praise it in those terms. In India, people read it like a history book.
A novelist writes a novel, and people read it. But reading is a solitary act. While it may elicit a varied and personal response, the communal nature of the audience is like having five hundred people read your novel and respond to it at the same time. I find that thrilling.
I wrote ‘Yellow Submarine’ for the Beatles. I wrote the screenplay for ‘The Games,’ about the Olympic Games. I wrote ‘Love Story,’ both the novel and the screenplay. I wrote ‘RPM’ for Stanley Kramer. Plus, I wrote two scholarly books and a 400-page translation from the Latin, and I dated June Wilkinson!
A good novel tells us the truth about its hero; but a bad novel tells us the truth about its author.
The great American novel has not only already been written, it has already been rejected.
I grew up in a working-class Catholic family in south Louisiana. I went to a state university. I taught literature, wrote a novel that was the novel I wanted to write, and got a couple of good reviews but no real traction. I had no idea how to get a job in TV.
I had thought for years, probably 30 or 40 years, that it would be a lot of fun to try my hand at a classic English mystery novel… I love that form very much because the reader is so familiar with all of the types of characters that are in there that they already identify with the book.
I’m always trying to make something that is impossible to film. Why would somebody just read a novel when they can see it on TV or in the cinema? I really have to think of the things fiction can do that film can’t and play to the strengths of the novel. With a novel, you can get right inside somebody’s head.
I only published my first novel at the age of 40. Till then, I wrote short stories.
Actually, I enjoy the process of writing a big long novel.
A novel ensures that we can look before and after, take action at whatever pace we choose, read again and again, skip and go back. The story in a book is humble and serviceable, available, friendly, is not switched on and off but taken up and put down, lasts a lifetime.
I’m not sure I have the physical strength to undertake a novel.
I did not set out to write another novel. One day I sat down with the thought of trying my hand at a piece of nonfiction, a personal memoir of youth, but over the next several weeks, without intending it, the work began evolving into what has become ‘Tomcat in Love.’
Several years ago, when I was about to start a novel, I thought I might get some mileage out of the idea of a civilization in which people somehow felt – that is, they shared – all the pain and all the pleasure they caused one another.
Considering my specialization in architecture, I’m not surprised that the first graphic novel to thoroughly engage, not to say captivate, me is Chip Kidd and Dave Taylor’s ‘Batman: Death by Design.’
English writing tends to fall into two categories – the big, baggy epic novel or the fairly controlled, tidy novel. For a long time, I was a fan of the big, baggy novel, but there’s definitely an advantage to having a little bit more control.
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. Everything I did is on the record and, if you want to hear it, just listen to the record.
