I had wanted to be a novelist for so long, but I didn’t have a story. That story came from the death of my father, and wrestling with how to help my mother. Writing it allowed me to work through my fears, frustrations and desires. I wanted control over the situation. And I wasn’t sure I would have any in real life.
When I’m writing a novel, I’m dealing with a double life. I live in the present at the same time that I live in the past with my characters. It is this that makes a novelist so eccentric and unpleasant.
I’m only a novelist on occasion. Many of my books are made up of brief texts collected together, short stories, or else they are books that have an overall structure but are composed of various texts.
You know, my mom, who inspired me to be a novelist, I remember her reading ‘The Agony and the Ecstasy,’ about Michelangelo, and saying, ‘No mother would want that for her child, no matter how great the artist.’ I have my share of demons, but I am a gregarious sort.
Really, what you should tell a novelist is, ‘Keep going until you finish the draft. Don’t show it to anyone.’
Language leads a double life – and so does the novelist. You chat with family and friends, you attend to your correspondence, you consult menus and shopping lists, you observe road signs, and so on. Then you enter your study, where language exists in quite another form – as the stuff of patterned artifice.
As a successful romantic novelist – one of my publishers is Mills & Boon – I create the sort of male heroes that no woman could fail to adore and few real men could hope to emulate.
For most of us, our protective lies or omissions are so insignificant that being found out would be only mildly embarrassing. But for some of us, our secret may threaten to destroy everything. And that is food and drink to a novelist.
I’ve been a novelist since 1995 and have had novels in and out of option, and watching that process just made me realize that I have to live by what I teach my students, because I teach screenwriting at Spellman.
A lot of times, in a store, clothes appear strange to me, their cuts or flourishes arbitrary. Why is this look stylish now? How long will it be stylish for? It’s slightly embarrassing to admit this – because, as a novelist, I’m supposed to be observant – but I’m flummoxed by the way other women dress.
A straight writer can write a gay novel and not worry about it, and a gay novelist can write about straight people.
I’m a white, middle-class male who had a happy childhood in Ohio. The world does not need me to be a novelist.
A novelist should not be too intelligent either, although… he may be permitted to be an intellectual.
Research can be a boon to a novelist – there are more things in heaven and Earth than can be dreamt of in a single writer’s philosophy – or it can become a hindrance, a thick layer of algae that weighs down the storytelling.
The novelist has a responsibility to adhere to the facts as closely as possible, and if they are inconvenient, that’s where the art comes in. You must work with intractable facts and find the dramatic shape inside them.
I am not expecting anyone to feel sorry for me, but when friends ask how it feels to be a debut novelist who has also been long listed for the Man Booker prize, I have to admit that my response has confused me. I am so overwhelmed, so delighted, so honoured and so surprised, I have come out in a violent cold.
But here’s the thing: what you do as a screenwriter is you sell your copyright. As a novelist, as a poet, as a playwright, you maintain your copyright.
I’ve been many kinds of writers in my career: novelist; tele-playwright; short story writer. As a high-school student, I wrote amateur pieces for fanzines, and I’ve written for Hollywood.
For a novelist, it’s kind of an onerous burden to represent an entire culture.
I am the luckiest novelist in the world. I was a first-time novelist who wasn’t awash in rejection slips, whose manuscript didn’t disappear in slush piles. I have had a wonderful time.
For me, as a beginning novelist, all other living writers form a control group for whom the world is a placebo.
I am a novelist through and through.
It’s almost a blessing when we meet people who naturally want to do the sort of things that are in high demand in society. What a gift to do that, as opposed to other people who would say, ‘I want to be a novelist but actually I have to be an accountant.’
I’m a novelist: I spend a great part of my day pretending to myself that I’m in a different world, being a different person, faced with decisions I pretend I haven’t created.
It’s very lucky when you have an artist – whether it’s a novelist or a filmmaker or a singer – whose career you can follow from the beginning and feel that you are in some way part of it, or part of the same world that it comes out of.
The artist deals in what cannot be said in words. The artist whose medium is fiction does this in words. The novelist says in words what cannot be said in words.
The trick to being a novelist is to act like an iceberg. Make it seem as if you’re displaying only one-tenth of what you know, and the other nine-tenths isn’t visible and never mind if that part is pure styrofoam!
To be a novelist, all I need is a pen and a piece of paper.
I was going to be a great woman novelist. Then the war came along and I think it’s hard for young people today, don’t you, to realize that when World War II happened we were dying to go and help our country.
That balance between involvement and detachment is what novelists do. It’s the ideal relationship between a novelist and a character, I think, total involvement and identity and empathy, stopping short of being autobiographical – in my case, anyway – but also quite detached.
The novelist, quite rightly, fears the psychoanalyst as both an enemy and a usurper.
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 don’t like to read novels where the novelist tells me what to think about the situation and the characters. I prefer to discover for myself.
A novelist can get by on story, but the poet has nothing but the words.
Being a novelist, you can roam around with a story and indulge yourself.
I hadn’t meant to do the pattern of publishing short stories and then a novel. I thought, ‘I’m a novelist. I know it.’ But you have to kind of write a lot of bad novels before you can write a good one, I think, so I did that. But meanwhile, I loved the short stories I did.
My role as a novelist is to explore ideas and imagination, and hopefully that will inspire people from my world to continue dreaming and to believe in dreams.
I’ve always thought a novelist only has one character, and that is himself or herself. In my case, me.
Being a novelist is hard for anyone – male or female. You don’t get to quit your day job.
Although some people think I am a romantic novelist I have always thought of myself as a rather gritty radical historian.
I am a novelist. I traffic in subtleties, and my goal in writing a novel is to leave the reader not knowing what to think. A good novel shouldn’t have a point.
Noir is dead for me because historically, I think it’s a simple view. I’ve taken it as far as it can go. I think I’ve expanded on it a great deal, taken it further than any other American novelist.
My whole life, I’ve wanted to be a novelist.
I don’t think I knew that you could be a novelist. I think a lot of my students are in the same condition. I thought it was unreachable, that it was sort of dead people. It took me a long time – I think I was well into novel writing before I really thought, ‘Actually, this is a valid pastime.’
As a novelist, I have a somewhat higher soapbox to stand on than most people do when it comes to talking back to the merchants of fear.
