When you put on the suits, when you pretend you’re honest and you’re robbing at a far higher level, these guys deserve to… well, to be in my novels, and I have special fates reserved for them.
I live in Harlem, New York City. I am unmarried. I like ‘Tristan,’ goat’s milk, short novels, lyric poems, heat, simple folk, boats and bullfights; I dislike ‘Aida,’ parsnips, long novels, narrative poems, cold, pretentious folk, buses and bridges.
I’ve always felt that the comic strip medium stands equally beside all the other story telling mediums: novels, movies, stage plays, opera, you know, you name it.
The books that really made an impact on me were not set in New Zealand. Some were New Zealand novels, but the New Zealandness of them was not what carried me or excited me.
In a culture defined by shades of gray, I think the absolute black and white choices in dark young adult novels are incredibly satisfying for readers.
When I moved to Los Angeles, I wrote spec screenplays. I was really poor, and I thought I was just gonna do this for a while to make a little money so I could write novels. I thought movies were a second-class art form. I condescended to it – I didn’t know enough to know it was really gonna be hard.
I feel just fine about ignoring or bypassing the rights of people I have known and loved to be rendered faithfully, or to be left in peace, and out of novels.
I didn’t want to write a biographie romancee especially since I already write novels, nor did I want to challenge the rules of the biography game, arbitrary as those rules might be.
For research, I like to go to the location of the places in the novels. The first thing that I do is involve my senses: I notice the smells; I open the trash cans and look at what people have thrown away.
I’m not going to write any more novels. I don’t want to end up being one of these angry, bitter writers moaning that only three people are reading him. I don’t want that.
I usually have more than one thing I’m working on at once – I’ve been working on three different novels. When I get stuck on one, I hop back and forth.
I mean, every novel’s a historical novel anyway. But calling something a historical novel seems to put mittens on it, right? It puts manners on it. And you don’t want your novels to be mannered.
I’ve read every one of Donald Goines’ books. So as soon as I heard there was an opportunity for one of his novels to be turned into a movie, I jumped at the opportunity.
Novels are make-believe and play for adults.
In writing my historical novels, I have to rely upon my imagination to a great extent. I think of it as ‘filling in the blanks.’ Medieval chroniclers could be callously indifferent to the needs of future novelists. But I think there is a great difference between filling in the blanks and distorting known facts.
Why do fairy tales exist, and why do movies exist? Why do novels exist? There has to be a reason for it; otherwise, none of these things would be there.
We don’t tend to write about disease in fiction – not just teen novels but all American novels – because it doesn’t fit in with our idea of the heroic romantic epic. There is room only for sacrifice, heroism, war, politics and family struggle.
Last time I was in London, I visited Number 5, Bruton Street, which is the address I gave to Violet Bridgerton, the matriarch of the Bridgerton clan in my novels. It was a bit disconcerting to learn that it’s actually a pub.
While novels are fiction, mine are usually very close to my heart. Like my other books, ‘The Lemon Orchard’ is inspired by something I care about. I care so deeply. The stories are my dreams, and I want to do a lot of research. Roberto is based on a real live friend of mine named Armando who worked in my garden.
I think of myself as a serious professor who, during the weekend, writes novels.
All the great novels, all the great films, all the great dramas are fictions that actually tell us the truth about us or about human nature or about human situations without being tied into the minutia of documentary events. Otherwise we might as well just make documentaries.
Of John Le Carre’s books, I’ve only read ‘The Spy Who Came In From The Cold,’ and I haven’t read anything by Graham Greene, but I’ve heard a great deal about how ‘Your Republic Is Calling You’ reminded English readers of those two writers. I don’t really have any particular interest in Cold War spy novels.
I would be rejected if I submitted any of my novels as romance novels.
As a reader, I’ve always been interested in dystopian novels like ‘Nineteen Eighty-four’.
I actually find novels that are determined to be funny at every turn quite oppressive.
Novels are longer than life.
When I was little, my grandma used to get romance novels, and she would get hundreds of these, and she’d read a dozen a month.
I love novels, but I’m not a novelist. I’m just a dramatist, which means I write lines for actors. That’s all I have ever wanted to do.
Seven of my novels take place in the Southwest, in the Four Corners area which has been my home since 1973. I know these mountains, rivers, mesas and canyons well, so it’s been natural for me to draw on my own personal experiences here.
My platform has been to reach reluctant readers. And one of the best ways I found to motivate them is to connect them with reading that interests them, to expand the definition of reading to include humor, science fiction/fantasy, nonfiction, graphic novels, wordless books, audio books and comic books.
All of my books, which are supposedly, I mean they’re called YA novels, my hope is that adults would find no reason not to read them if they read them.
Novels, in my experience, are slow in coming, and once I’ve begun them I know I have years rather than months of work ahead of me.
At the height of the British Empire very few English novels were written that dealt with British power. It’s extraordinary that at the moment in which England was the global superpower the subject of British power appeared not to interest most writers.
I read too many romance novels during my formative years. I have a penchant for romantic comedies. I understand why ‘Romeo and Juliet’ came to such a pass.
There are now 30-year-old Mexican writers who do great novels in which Mexico isn’t even mentioned.
I am one of the writers who wish to create serious works of literature which dissociate themselves from those novels which are mere reflections of the vast consumer cultures of Tokyo and the subcultures of the world at large.
Doing graphic novels is cool! It’s fun! You get to write something, and then see it visually page by page, panel by panel, working with the artist, you get to see it fleshed out.
I used to think that I could be successful if I pretended to be a 23-year-old black woman. I wanted to find a young black woman who would be willing to go in on this with me. I would write her novels, and then she would do the touring. I always thought I was too old and the wrong color.
I have two ideas for novels at the moment, neither of them all that conventional, but I’m not ready to choose between them yet, let alone settle down to the process of writing.
I plan to live to be 98, so I’ll be the guy at Dundas and Yonge flogging a box of mouldy novels.
My maternal grandmother – she was a compulsive reader. She had only been through five grades of elementary school, but she was a member of the municipal library, and she brought home two or three books a week for me. They could be dime novels or Balzac.
I studied philosophy, religious studies, and English. My training was writing four full-length novels and hiring an editor to tear them apart. I had enough money to do that, and then rewriting and rewriting and rewriting.
I read a lot of the ‘Pern books’ growing up – basically up through ‘All the Weyrs of Pern,’ maybe a couple after that. As far as formative dragon influences are concerned, she’s probably one of the top ones; I know I read other fantasy novels that had them, but none particularly stick in mind.
Like so many aspiring writers who still have boxes of things they’ve written in their parents’ houses, I filled notebooks with half-finished poems and stories and first paragraphs of novels that never got written.
When I write a novel, I want it to be completely different from a screenplay. I’m very conscious of the difference, and I want novels to work purely as novels. Otherwise I don’t see how they’ll survive – why don’t we just all go to the movies or watch television.
I see so, so many novels written by people who are obviously short story writers. What they end up doing, it’s going the full distance, covering three hundred pages or so, but they do it by just writing five or six long stories, and weaving them together, making them interdependent.
Right from childhood, I have enjoyed films which belong to the thriller genre. As a kid, I would read novels written by Agatha Christie and James Hadley Chase.
I entered a poem in a poetry contest around 1987, and the poem won and I received $1,000 for it. That made me realize that maybe what I was writing was worth reading to people. After that, for some reason, I turned to novels and I’ve written mainly novels ever since.
I wrote two novels about a yoga studio in Los Angeles published by Penguin under the pen name Rain Mitchell.
I don’t write tracts, I write novels. I’m not a preacher, I’m a fiction writer.
