And it is a folly to try to craft a novel for the screen, to write a novel with a screen contract in mind.
There is no other way of writing a novel than to begin at the beginning at to continue to the end.
There’s no such thing as the contemporary novel. Before I seem the complete reactionary, let me add that I’ve happily joined in many discussions about ‘the contemporary novel’ where what that usually, unproblematically means is novels that have appeared recently or may appear soon.
However novel it may appear, I shall venture the assertion, that, until women assume the place in society which good sense and good feeling alike assign to them, human improvement must advance but feebly.
Good fiction creates empathy. A novel takes you somewhere and asks you to look through the eyes of another person, to live another life.
A fact is a simple statement that everyone believes. It is innocent, unless found guilty. A hypothesis is a novel suggestion that no one wants to believe. It is guilty, until found effective.
There are metaphysical problems, problems of human existence, that philosophy has never known how to grasp in all their concreteness and that only the novel can seize.
Whenever I write a novel, music just sort of naturally slips in (much like cats do, I suppose).
In a novel you have to resist the urge to tell everything.
I read the novel ‘Miracle at St. Anna’ when it was first released, and I loved it.
My solo novel ‘Icons’ was optioned by Alcon Entertainment, the folks who made the ‘Beautiful Creatures’ movie, and that’s gotten as far as a script, but no news yet.
In 1996, when my first novel, ‘Masquerade,’ was published, I knew international thrillers – or spy novels, if you prefer – had been the domain of male authors for decades.
I once gave a character in a novel my inability to get past the same point in any work of philosophy: that moment when seeing is suddenly occluded and you know you can go no further.
If you have to deal with our friends at ICE, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, it’s like a Kafka novel. Files just disappear.
For me, a paragraph in a novel is a bit like a line in a poem. It has its own shape, its own music, its own integrity.
A great novel is concerned primarily with the interior lives of its characters as they respond to the inconvenient narratives that fate imposes on them. Movie adaptations of these monumental fictions often fail because they become mere exercises in interior decoration.
When I’m working on a novel, I work 70-hour weeks.
There is not one big cosmic meaning for all, there is only the meaning we each give to our life, an individual meaning, an individual plot, like an individual novel, a book for each person.
A good novel is worth more than the best scientific study.
When I was sixteen, I wrote the first hundred or so pages of a novel about a piano that was haunted by the ghost of an evil blues musician.
For me as a writer, Albanian is simply an extraordinary means of expression – rich, malleable, adaptable. As I have said in my latest novel, ‘Spiritus,’ it has modalities that exist only in classical Greek, which puts one in touch with the mentality of antiquity.
It was my angry, Dickensian novel, I suppose. It was cathartic – I expended a lot of frustration on that one.
When I do a novel, I don’t really use the script, I use the book; when I did Apocalypse Now, I used Heart of Darkness. Novels usually have so much rich material.
The ordinariness of living to be old is too novel a thing to appreciate.
If you don’t like my book, write your own. If you don’t think you can write a novel, that ought to tell you something. If you think you can, do. No excuses. If you still don’t like my novels, find a book you do like.
One should be able to return to the first sentence of a novel and find the resonances of the entire work.
To begin with, I always want to go for scripts that do not have a reference in Hindi cinema. If it is novel and unique, it definitely has a better shelf value.
I have often heard that the novel is dead. But I see novels produced, I don’t know how many a week, in France. I have the impression it’s carrying along quite well.
The same parts of my brain get as excited as when I study bio or read a novel and write a paper on it.
It’s no accident that my first novel was called Americana. This was a private declaration of independence, a statement of my intention to use the whole picture, the whole culture.
‘Annapurna’ is a sort of novel. It’s a novel, but a true novel.
You can catch a scent in the wind – an idea, or a concept – and follow it. You can delve into your subconscious and see what happens, in a way you just can’t when you’re writing a novel.
My advice to anyone adapting a novel is that once they’ve read it and learnt to understand it, then they must throw it away and never look at it again!
Writing a novel is like making love, but it’s also like having a tooth pulled. Pleasure and pain. Sometimes it’s like making love while having a tooth pulled.
I always say that in any roomful of people, I could hive a novel out of any one person’s family or life story.
When you’re lucky enough to have a good film made of your novel – and ‘Never Let Me Go’ is, believe me, a heartbreakingly good film indeed – you get wonderfully talented individuals each focusing on their special area.
Before I was reading science fiction, I read Hemingway. Farewell to Arms was my first adult novel that said not everything ends well. It was one of those times where reading has meant a great deal to me, in terms of my development – an insight came from that book.
Writing a novel is actually searching for victims. As I write I keep looking for casualties. The stories uncover the casualties.
Only in a novel are all things given full play.
I am not an academic who happens to have written a novel. I am a novelist who happens to be quite good academically.
A novel should be an experience and convey an emotional truth rather than arguments.
I’ve never been good with deadlines. My early novels, I wrote by myself. No one knew I was writing a novel; I didn’t have a contract.
Does the novel have to deepen the psychology of its heroes? Certainly the modern novel does, but the ancient legends did not do the same. Oedipus’ psychology was deduced by Aeschylus or Freud, but the character is simply there, fixed in a pure and terribly disquieting state.
Poetry seems to sink into us the way prose doesn’t. I can still quote verses I learned when I was very young, but I have trouble remembering one line of a novel I just finished reading.
Every time I write a new novel about something sombre and sobering and terrible I think, ‘oh Lord, they’re not going to want to go here’. But they do. Readers of fiction read, I think, for a deeper embrace of the world, of reality. And that’s brave.
All novels are about crime. You’d be hard pressed to find any novel that does not have an element of crime. I don’t see myself as a crime novelist, but there are crimes in my books. That’s the nature of storytelling, if you want to reflect the real world.
To us, the value of a work lies in its newness: the invention of new forms, or a novel combination of old forms, the discovery of unknown worlds or the exploration of unfamiliar areas in worlds already discovered – revelations, surprises.
I took inspiration from ‘Fountainhead,’ the way in which Ayn Rand conveyed her political philosophy through an immensely popular novel.
My first novel was called ‘Betrayed by F. Scott Fitzgerald,’ about the difficulties of graduating from college, the longing and mourning you feel when all your promise seems to float away.
I’m writing another novel and I know what I’m going to do after, which may be something more like this again, maybe some strange mixture of fiction and non-fiction.
It was only after five years in the army, when I was having to do a very boring job in a very boring place, that I thought: ‘Why not try writing a novel?’ partly out of youthful arrogance and partly because there had been a long line of writers in my mother’s family.
Any setting can be a good setting for a novel.
A novel is a collision of ideas. Three or four threads may be floating around in the writer’s consciousness, and at a single moment in time, these ideas collide and produce a novel.
When I wrote ‘The Pregnant Widow’ three or four years ago, I tried to reread my first novel, ‘The Rachel Papers,’ because their young heroes are the same age. I couldn’t finish it. It seemed to me so technically slapdash and weak.
The financial markets tend to be just a backdrop for a novel, for a heist or something that isn’t necessarily integral to it. On the whole, I don’t think the financial world has been well served by novels.
