I certainly think we’re going to see more and more graphic novels and more illustrated novels.
Many of my works fall into the category of ‘Zeitgeist novels’. Yet I hope that they aren’t only reportage, but also attempts to convey the sense of the present to the future.
Unfortunately, I don’t get to read nearly as much as I want because I’m always working on my own stuff, either the novels or newspaper columns.
In most conventional novels, God is not allowed to be nuts. Nor are nuts allowed to be God.
It seems to me that good novels celebrate the mystery in ordinary life, and summing it all up in psychological terms strips the mystery away.
Actually my first eight books were historical novels, but they were never published.
Anyone who sets foot into the ‘Watchmen’ universe and isn’t just a little nervous should be given a few days of electroshock therapy. I’ve always considered ‘Watchmen’ to be one of the best graphic novels ever written, and when it came out back in 1986 I was as blown away as everyone else. Just masterful.
In 1955, when I’d write a science-fiction novel, I’d set it in the year 2000. I realised around 1977 that, ‘My God, it’s getting exactly like those novels we used to write in the 1950s!’ Everything’s just turning out to be real.
As far as I am concerned, I write novels, and other people can do the labelling.
My first novel, ‘You Must be Sisters,’ was started in Pakistan. I’ve wrote several novels and a TV drama set or partly-set there.
I am extremely interested in how people negotiate catastrophe, not because I’m morbidly interested in it but because I’m interested in the secret of resilience; that’s what I’m always exploring in the stories and the novels.
I’ve always said men should study romance novels to find out how women think and what they want, both during the courtship phase and in a lifelong partner.
Great novels have great characterization no matter what. But multiple points of view let me examine characters from entirely different perspectives, allowing me to learn more about everyone in the process.
As for ‘Great Expectations’, it is up there for me with the world’s greatest novels, not least as it vindicates plot as no other novel I can think of does, since what there is to find out is not coincidence or happenstance but the profoundest moral truth.
I hope people will like my novels after I’m dead. And I hope my children think about me in good ways, by and large.
I could read at a very early age and I loved stories, losing myself in stories, novels.
One of the things the novel can do is address big questions in ways that are accessible to people. It’s not that I want to teach people, but these are the things that interest me, and this is my medium for exploring ideas, and I think the potential of novels to do that is massive.
The novel that’s contemporary in the sense of being wholly ‘of now’ is an impossibility, if only because novels may take years to write, so the ‘now’ with which they begin will be defunct by the time they’re finished.
My second, third and fourth novels were mistakes, essentially.
I think that’s because believable action is based on authenticity, and accuracy is very important to me. I always spend time researching my novels, exploring the customs and attitudes of the county I’m using for their setting.
I think there is often a ‘what if’ proposition that gets me thinking about all my novels.
I don’t see novels ending with any real sense of closure.
The thing about the ‘Melrose’ novels is that I have to feel they’re impossible when I set out.
When it comes to writers, I’m a huge fan of Ian McEwan. I’ve never taken a writing course, but reading and deconstructing his novels has been as good a lesson as any.
One good reason for writing novels based on your life is that you have something to read in old age when you’ve forgotten what happened.
Teen problem novels? I can go through them like a box of chocolates. And there are fantasy books out now that need a lot more editing. Fantasy got to be so popular that people began to think ‘We don’t need to be as diligent with the razor blade,’ but they do.
We try to make our own BTS context. Maybe it’s risky to bring some inspiration from novels from so long ago, but I think it paid off more. It comes through like a gift box for our fans. That’s something you can’t find easily from American artists.
I myself am pathetically impressed when I meet writers of very long novels. How can they spend so many hundreds of hours at the miserable, lonely pastime of creating fiction?
The L.A Trilogy is a series of three novels starring Ray, a robot detective, and his boss, a computer called Googol. Set in an alternative version of 1960s Los Angeles, each book will be more or less standalone but together will form an overarching story arc with ‘Brisk Money’ as the origin story.
I am an avid reader of Sidney Sheldon thriller novels.
I think that Shakespeare himself raided fairy tales and chronicle writers, and he always looked to people who worked in the mythic genres, whether it was folk tales or popular novels.
I’ve always had the wish, the nostalgia to be able to write detective novels. At heart, the principal themes of detective novels are close to the things that obsess me: disappearance, the problems of identity, amnesia, the return to an enigmatic past.
There are nineteen Harry Bosch books, and someone told me if you add up the descriptions of Harry from all of them, it would come to less than three pages. He’s very elliptically described over the two decades during which the novels occur. I did that by intention.
Novelists of a conservative or more purely aesthetic bent hold up better on the surface, but their novels go in and out of fashion according to relevance or irrelevance.
‘Ordinary Grace’ freed me. I don’t have to write only Cork O’Connor novels now. I’m liberated. I can write whatever I want to write.
I watch a lot of teen TV and read a lot of YA novels. I also talk to teens whenever I can. There are cultural differences between when I was a teen and now, but emotions – anger, angst, love – are the same.
I think of novels as houses. You live in them over the course of a long period, both as a reader and as a writer.
I read novels but I also read the Bible. And study it, you know? And the more I learn, the more excited I get.
In my office in Florida I have, I think, 30 manuscript piles around the room. Some are screenplays or comic books or graphic novels. Some are almost done. Some I’m rewriting. If I’m working with a co-writer, they’ll usually write the first draft. And then I write subsequent drafts.
I have been a film buff all my life and believe that the finest cinema is fully the equal of the best novels.
The reason Saul Bellow doesn’t talk to me anymore is because he knows his new novels are not worth reading.
Great, big, serious novels always get awards. If it’s a battle between a great, big, serious novel and a funny novel, the funny novel is doomed.
I like to read Bengali novels and short stories. I am not that fond of reading English books, as I don’t have a connect with it.
Cinema isn’t just a good medium for translating graphic novels. It’s specifically a good medium for superheroes. On a fundamental, emotional level, superheroes, whether in print or on film, serve the same function for their audience as Golden Age movie stars did for theirs: they create glamour.
Novels are such mysterious and amorphous and tender things.
I love reading novels, and I love going to movies, but I kind of hate going to an adaptation of a novel, and it starts off with a voiceover.
Young adult novels don’t shy away from the discussion of weight issues, and ‘Blubber,’ the tale of an overweight, not-so-sympathetic fifth-grader bullied by her peers, is a refreshing take.
I always say I write my own novels and the characters don’t take control of me, but in fact, I look at the characters in the early stages and I think, ‘What is he or she like,’ and they slowly come together and they become the person they are.
I love general history. That’s all I read really. I don’t read novels, I read history. I love it. I live in an area that’s really rich in Civil War history. I live in Kentucky on a farm. A lot of revolution, a lot of military history I love.
Everything is personal – the poems and the crime novels. I have never been involved in any murders, but there are strong autobiographical elements in each.
The man Dickens, whom the world at large thought it knew, stood for all the Victorian virtues – probity, kindness, hard work, sympathy for the down-trodden, the sanctity of domestic life – even as his novels exposed the violence, hypocrisy, greed, and cruelty of the Victorian age.
I never thought I would become amazing. I never thought I would be as great as my father. I would like to continue writing novels, and hopefully, at some point, I would like to make the switch from being ‘Stephen Hawking’s daughter’ to ‘novelist Lucy Hawking,’ and that will be a fabulous day.
Being the family’s literate one, my wife doesn’t watch television much, preferring third-world novels, though she’ll sit in now and then when I have on Jon Stewart.
My mother was a reader; my father was a reader. Not anything particularly sophisticated. My mother read fat historical or romantic novels; my father liked to read Westerns, Zane Grey, that kind of stuff. Whatever they brought in, I read.
