I do think novels are overlooked. I did write one some years ago that I think is quite good, called ‘The End of the Story,’ not to blow my own horn.
In effect I am not a novelist, but rather a failed essayist who started to write novels because he didn’t know how to write essays.
I tend to write longer narrative pieces after I’ve finished writing a novel – when the fiction’s finished and put away, and I have a chance to take all the ideas that are buried inside of my novels and work with them directly.
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.
I knew I wanted to write novels, but I could not finish what I started. The closer I got, the more ways I’d find to screw it up.
In the past, it was only in science fiction novels that you could read about ordinary people being able to go to space… But you laid the foundation for space tourism.
As well as writing novels and doing short-order journalism, I am also the full-time carer of my husband, who has Alzheimer’s. Each day feels like a race that must be run.
Between Scott on the earlier side and Dickens and Thackeray on the other, there was an immense production of novels, illustrated by not a few names which should rank high in the second class, while some would promote more than one of them to the first.
I asked a French critic a couple of years ago why my books did so well in France. He said it was because in my novels people both act and think. I got a kick out of that.
I’m very critical of crime novels that use gratuitous violence to shock readers when it isn’t necessary. If that’s all you have to offer as a writer, perhaps you’re in the wrong job.
It’s with bad sentiments that one makes good novels.
White people use their literature to maintain culture. That’s why you find references to Milton and Spencer and Shakespeare and Dostoyevsky in contemporary novels.
I think I would have been a writer, anyhow, in the sense of having written a story every now and then, or continued writing poetry. But it was the war experience and the two novels I wrote about Vietnam that really got me started as a professional writer.
Sex is. There is nothing more to be done about it. Sex builds no roads, writes no novels and sex certainly gives no meaning to anything in life but itself.
I got my love of animals from the Dr. Doolittle books and my love of Africa from the Tarzan novels. I remember my mum taking me to the first Tarzan film, which starred Johnny Weissmuller, and bursting into tears. It wasn’t what I had imagined at all.
I love how easy it is to run my business, Writing Workshops Los Angeles, with the help of email and my website. I love that I don’t have to use cuneiform, a quill, or a typewriter to write my novels – I love to write on my laptop!
Overpopulated fiction can be so confusing that readers put the story down. Under-populated novels can seem claustrophobic or boring. You want the right number of characters for your particular work.
Every new medium has, within a short time of its introduction, been condemned as a threat to young people. Pulp novels would destroy their morals, TV would wreck their eyesight, video games would make them violent.
So, in some ways, the political songs tend to be a bit more like reportage, whereas the love songs tend to be like novels, you can pick them up off the shelf and go into them any time.
Milan Kundera was my literature professor. He’s a Francophile, so he made us read French novels like ‘Les Liaisons Dangereuses,’ which I made a version of many years later as ‘Valmont.’
I never could read science fiction. I was just uninterested in it. And you know, I don’t like to read novels where the hero just goes beyond what I think could exist. And it doesn’t interest me because I’m not learning anything about something I’ll actually have to deal with.
Most novels put out by small or corporate presses don’t really sell that well – usually a thousand copies or so. Working with a small press, you have to be willing to book reading tours, plan events, make contacts with other small press authors, and find new ways of getting word about your new work out there.
I’ve had a dozen novels published and have made far more than a dozen mistakes. Which is why Randy Susan Meyers and I wrote a guidebook to help authors avoid making our mistakes.
Writing is writing. It’s an abiding, wonderful talent, craft, gift that stays with you your whole life. And you can go in different forms, and you can try them. Look at me: I’m writing novels because I found something I love because I tried it.
I developed the habit of writing novels behind a closed door, or at my uncle’s, on the dining table.
Not many people were speaking truth to power in the ’80s. I had a really good time doing it – I found it gratifying. It was a joy to have an opportunity to say what you believed. It’s challenging to do it in fiction, but I liked writing the novels. I liked writing ‘Democracy’ particularly.
I like Victorian children’s novels extremely a lot. If I would say I collect anything, that’s what I’ll hunt for now and again at old book stores.
I have tried very hard as a novelist to say, ‘Novels are about individuals and especially larger than life individuals.’
I’ve written some standalone novels, but a book series allows fans in. There’s much more intense involvement.
You have to be kind of clued into them, they are a world of their own, and most people find them disappointing because the best short stories are not constructed like novels.
My self-publishing adventure led to my work being picked up by a traditional publisher and eventually hitting the bestseller lists. That led to two more bestselling novels.
Michael Chabon has long moved easily between the playful, heartfelt realism of novels like ‘The Mysteries of Pittsburgh’ and ‘Wonder Boys’ and his playful, heartfelt, more fantastical novels like ‘The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay’ and ‘The Yiddish Policemen’s Union.’
People used to expect literary novels to deepen the experience of living; now they are happy with any sustained display of writerly cleverness.
Grand Central really didn’t want me doing anything under my own name but the ‘Kitty’ novels.
I have written every one of my novels to convince somebody of something.
I write in the most classical French because this form is necessary for my novels: to translate the murky, floating, unsettling atmosphere I wanted them to have, I had to discipline it into the clearest, most traditional language possible.
I’d probably play games obsessively if I didn’t write, although I admit I don’t read novels partly because I don’t enjoy it, not just because it’s the wrong side of the creator-consumer barrier for me. I’m a visual writer. I think in moving 3D images and write down what I observe.
Because, if one is writing novels today, concentrating on the beauty of the prose is right up there with concentrating on your semi-colons, for wasted effort.
We had all these famous writers in Sweden and from all over the world home at dinner. I wanted to be a writer, and I wanted to be a highbrow writer as my father. He never, ever read anything like crime novels. He wrote biographies of Dante, James Joyce, August Strindberg and Joseph Conrad.
Most novels, I find, are three times longer than they need to be. Very little happens, and I don’t want to waste my time with them.
I’d love to adapt more contemporary novels. But there isn’t really enough story and character to make a really satisfying serial, so they tend to be single dramas.
