I am sometimes asked to name my favourite books. The list changes, depending on my mood, the year, tricks played by memory. I might mention novels by Nabokov and Calvino and Tolkien on one occasion, by Fitzgerald and Baldwin and E.B. White on another. Camus often features, as do Tolstoy, Borges, Morrison and Manto.
Life resembles a novel more often than novels resemble life.
I think graphic novels are closer to prose than film, which is a really different form.
I have a lot of novels that I haven’t finished. I usually get 150 pages in and I realize it’s not going anywhere. I don’t publish everything I write. I must have six unfinished novels at least.
I work on my novels wherever I have a PC, and I have four or five places around the world where I do have a PC. These days you can just slip a little flash drive into your top pocket, fly for 12 hours, come to another place, plug it into a computer and you are away again.
I majored in English in college, so I read the classic dystopian novels like ‘1984’ and ‘Brave New World.’
Aphorisms are bad for novels. They stick in the reader’s teeth.
Revisiting much-loved childhood novels is never easy.
Novels aren’t pedagogical instruments, or instructions in law or physics or any other discipline. A novel has to be an emotional experience, a trip of the imagination, and because science has raised so many issues that concern and affect humans, it’s a good starting place for me.
I really love to make sweeping historical gestures that are like little illustrations of novels.
The mystery form was very helpful for me as a beginning writer because mystery novels and suspense novels have a beginning, a middle and an end.
I think that I altered history in ‘Elizabeth,’ and I interpreted history far more than Danny Boyle or Richard Attenborough did to ‘Slumdog Millionaire’ or ‘Gandhi.’ They took Indian novels or Indian characters and very much stayed within the Indian diaspora.
Charles Dickens left us fifteen novels, and in an ideal world, everyone would read all of them.
Many people have compared me to the Victorian adventure writer, Rider Haggard. I accept that as a compliment. As a boy growing up in Central Africa I read all Haggard’s African novels.
If you enjoy math and you write novels, it’s very rare that you’ll get a chance to put your math into a novel. I leapt at the chance.
When you write about a Muslim woman, like I did with my previous novels – ‘Minaret’, for example, which is about a woman who starts to wear the hijab – it sets all the alarm bells ringing.
The idea that people in novels should be more sympathetic than people in life simply baffles me.
I was writing novels in high school and apprenticed myself in a way both to Faulkner and to Hemingway.
I want a career writing these novels that I can be proud of. And then I want one as a screenwriter.
I think of novels in architectural terms. You have to enter at the gate, and this gate must be constructed in such a way that the reader has immediate confidence in the strength of the building.
I tend to be more of a novel writer. In fact, some of my novels started out as short stories, and I just got carried away! I think some of my best writing is in the short story form, but novels come more naturally to me.
I envisioned that as my life: staying in academia to make a living and then taking summers off to write my novels.
My novels are often about people who are in love or attracted to each other.
All great novels, all true novels, are bisexual.
A lot of people have trouble with their second novel – the dreaded sophomore jinx. I wrote three books in between the two novels, and they just weren’t very good.
My dad goes through war novels like I go through boxes of Cinnamon Toast Crunch.
I used the pen name because I knew I wanted to write better novels under my own name someday.
I had wanted to write English crime novels based on the American hard-boiled style, and for the first two novels about Brixton, the critics didn’t actually know I was Irish.
I really enjoy writing novels. It’s like the ocean. You can just build a boat and take off.
I love to write. I write everything across the board – kids’ stories and novels and scripts. I actually would like to give that a go; I’d like to try to be a writer.
I never read detective novels. I started out in graduate school writing a more serious book. Right around that time I read ‘The Day of the Jackal’ and ‘The Exorcist’. I hadn’t read a lot of commercial fiction, and I liked them.
My dream remains to inform and entertain through fiction in the form of novels and movies that compete in the marketplace of ideas.
I’ve been fortunate in that I never actually read any Jane Austen until I was thirty, thus sparing myself several decades of the unhappiness of having no new Jane Austen novels to read.
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.
It’s a luxury to be able to tell a long form story. I love novels, and I love to have a long relationship with characters.
Size matters in fiction, but so does lack of size. Everything else being equal, fat novels tend to be perceived as serious, very thin ones as more honest, more real. Writers address these age-old expectations by filling their big books with philosophy and cramming their little ones with feeling.
I can’t change the past, and I don’t think I would. I don’t expect to be understood. I like what I’ve written, the stories and two novels. If I had to give up what I’ve written in order to be clear of this disease, I wouldn’t do it.
I used to go with my parents and loved it, I was in school plays, and I started reading plays before I started reading novels. I’ll defend it to the hilt. When theatre is good it is fabulous.
I’ve written six novels and four pieces of nonfiction, so I don’t really have a genre these days.
I’d say that the question whether love still exists plays the same role in my novels as the question of God’s existence in Dostoevsky.
I’ve always been ambidextrous, writing short stories and novels, and I pretty much have been writing a novel and a handful of short stories every year since ’91.
When I look back over my novels what I find is that when I think I’m finished with a theme, I’m generally not. And usually themes will recur from novel to novel in odd, new guises.
When you get inside a literary novel you feel that the author, more often than not, just doesn’t know enough about things. They haven’t been around enough – novelists never go anywhere. Once I discovered true books about real things – books like ‘How To Run a Company’ – I stopped reading novels.
I don’t think Ireland has ever had a genius for the novel. Of course, there were plenty of Irish novels, but I don’t think that was ever the natural means of expression for the Irish.
I’m always writing across the same themes. But with short stories, I’m doing something different than with novels. In some ways, they’re coming from a much deeper place.
I try to keep all my novels in print. Sometimes publishers don’t agree with me as to their worth.
There are two kinds of sculptures. There’s the kind that subtracts: Michelangelo starts with a block of marble and chips away. And then there is the kind that adds, building with clay, piling it on. The way I write novels is to keep piling on and piling on and piling on.
My novels are certainly more exciting than my own life.
True stories, autobiographical stories, like some novels, begin long ago, before the acts in the account, before the birth of some of the people in the tale.
Walter Scott has no business to write novels, especially good ones. It is not fair. He has fame and profit enough as a poet, and should not be taking the bread out of the mouths of other people.
Novels are the means by which we can escape the moment we are imprisoned in, but at the same time, the roots of a novel are in the world in which it is written. We write, and we read, to understand the world we live in.
I like the idea of making big budget films with a heart. I like graphic novels more than comic books.
Expand the definition of ‘reading’ to include non-fiction, humor, graphic novels, magazines, action adventure, and, yes, even websites. It’s the pleasure of reading that counts; the focus will naturally broaden. A boy won’t read shark books forever.
One of the themes in my novels is that our crises can turn into blessings. We can feel like our world has crumbled, but ten years down the road when we look back on that time, we can see God’s hand at work. I love writing that theme into my books.
Perhaps, all writers walk such a line. In general – as we all do in our dreams – I believe I put something of myself into all the characters in my novels, male as well as female.
Although I now spend most of my time writing novels for teenagers and adults, ‘readaloudability’ is still a criterion I try to adhere to.
I write what I call ‘novels of consolation’ for people who are bright and sophisticated.
Just as good books give me the joys of being alive, bad novels depress me, and as I notice this sentiment coming from the pages, I stop. I also do not hesitate to walk out of a movie house if the film is bad.
