In my novels, there are twelve ancient ‘memory tools,’ all now lost. Each of the ‘Reincarnationist’ books revolves around a different tool.
Sometimes novels are considered ‘important’ in the way medicine is – they taste terrible and are difficult to get down your throat, but are good for you.
Violence is inevitable in crime novels, but there are many different ways to tell a story. I use my characters’ reactions to illustrate the worst moments rather than let readers witness them at first hand.
Some say it is the elements of hope and wonder in children’s books that make them special. But there are many dark young adult novels these days. Adults loved Harry Potter, though it was written for the young. In the end, it is probably up to the reader of any age to decide if this book is for him or her.
Once I finished ‘Eileen,’ I wanted to write more novels. I don’t see myself stopping any time soon.
Someone wrote a piece about Henry Green in The Partisan Review that was so intriguing that I got one of his novels, Loving, I believe, which was the first that came to attention in the United States.
I know I’m not a wordsmith. And I don’t write poetry. Sometimes I think I should, because it’s really helpful. But I always wanted to write novels.
I am Superwoman. I am the author of 15 novels, including one about cancer. I am not, however, someone who ‘gets’ cancer. I am a sun worshipper who never thought it could happen to me.
Unlike novels with a hero or two heroines, in ‘One Amazing Thing,’ all the characters tell stories they’ve never told anyone before, so all the voices become equally important.
I hadn’t realized quite how intense the first few years of grad school would be. When you’re being assigned 40 books a week… there’s not much room for novels.
I started out in life as a poet; I was only writing poetry all through my 20s. It wasn’t until I was about 30 that I got serious about writing prose. While I was writing poems, I would often divert myself by reading detective novels; I liked them.
I think the short story is a very underrated art form. We know that novels deserve respect.
We love fantasy novels in which the characters think that they’re peasants but turn out to be princes and kings.
War has always been a part of science fiction. Even before the birth of SF as a standalone genre in 1926, speculative novels such as ‘The Battle of Dorking’ from 1871 showed how SF’s trademark ‘what if’ scenarios could easily encompass warfare.
All my novels are about the ambiguities that lie beneath the sharp edges of the law.
Novels are my favorite to write and read. I do like writing personal essays, too. I’m not really a short story writer, nor do I tend to gravitate to them as a reader.
Graphic novels are not traditional literature, but that does not mean they are second-rate. Images are a way of writing. When you have the talent to be able to write and to draw, it seems a shame to choose one. I think it’s better to do both.
I’ve done a lot of books with Asian antecedents to them – some of my fantasy novels have been that way, and certainly in the ‘Battletech’ universe, there’s a lot of Asian culture in that.
Nobody told me how hard it was going to be to get published. I wrote four novels that nobody wanted, sent them out all over, collected hundreds and hundreds of rejection slips.
Sometimes people write novels and they just be so wordy and so self-absorbed.
I write novels because there is something I don’t understand in reality.
I think all novels are contemporary. When people went to see ‘Antony-Cleopatra’ at the Globe in the 16th century, they were not going to get a history lesson on the Roman Empire. It was about love, sex, and also about dynastic troubles.
I have often noticed that after I had bestowed on the characters of my novels some treasured item of my past, it would pine away in the artificial world where I had so abruptly placed it.
‘Game of Thrones’ is taking dense novels and trying to shrink it all down to a slightly manageable series in the sense that there are so many characters and so many locations.
I felt that, in some ways, my novels lacked heart because of the distance between me and the subject matter. But no one wants to read a book based on good health, a happy upbringing, a long marriage.
I feel that I am a scholar who only with the left hand writes novels.
I think ever since I started to read, there have been favorite novels for different stages of my life. And one is never bumped out of place to yield to another. Instead, I just add to my favorite shelves.
Graham Greene’s work must be included in any survey of top-rank spy novels, and ‘Our Man in Havana’ may be his best.
The Florida in my novels is not as seedy as the real Florida. It’s hard to stay ahead of the curve. Every time I write a scene that I think is the sickest thing I have ever dreamed up, it is surpassed by something that happens in real life.
One of the most widely read novels by a black American is Ralph Ellison’s ‘Invisible Man.’ It is his masterwork – it won the National Book Award in 1953 and catapulted my man to the highest levels of literary esteem.
Here’s the thing about romance novels: The moment when the hero and heroine discover that they’re perfect for each other is often the moment when it’s them against the world.
Henry Miller wrote novels, but he calls his protagonist Henry, often Henry Miller, and his books are in this gray area between memoir and novel.
Asking the author of historical novels to teach you about history is like expecting the composer of a melody to provide answers about radio transmission.
The important discovery I made very early is that my novels had to be written without any given plan or outline. I can’t do it in any other way. But then they are dependent on the sentences, my intuition, and, as I have experienced many times, the subconscious.
I was pretty dead set against ever writing an academic novel. It’s always been my view that there are already more than enough academic novels and that most of them aren’t any good. Most of them are self-conscious and bitter, the work of people who want to settle grudges.
I don’t think you can write novels on the road. You need a certain stability.
There are plenty of brilliant people who are too stressed out to read challenging literary novels.
Many novels and modern publications are corrupters of morals or distorters of truth.
Even in horror novels where you know most characters aren’t going to make it to the end, it’s crucial to have fully fleshed-out characters. If you don’t do that, the reader doesn’t care what happens to them.
At least half the mystery novels published violate the law that the solution, once revealed, must seem to be inevitable.
I wrote one terrible manuscript after another for a decade and I guess they gradually got a little less terrible. But there were many, many unpublished short stories, abandoned screenplays and novels… a Library of Congress worth of awful literature.
In order to write novels for a living – it’s not pathological, but I do think and worry and brood and fidget about stuff that I’m working on.
The light that radiates from the great novels time can never dim, for human existence is perpetually being forgotten by man and thus the novelists’ discoveries, however old they may be, will never cease to astonish.
I’m a fast writer, and crime novels are easy to do. It’s much harder to write a 1,000 word article, where everything has to be 100 per cent correct.
I want to write novels, and I want to write and direct theater.
I love graphic novels – I love reading them, I enjoyed writing them, I would love to go back and do them again. I hope I’m savvy enough to do them in the right way.
I had novels to write, so I wrote them.
I started writing morning pages just to keep my hand in, you know, just because I was a writer and I didn’t know what else to do but write. And then one day as I was writing, a character came sort of strolling in and I realized, Oh my God, I don’t have to be just a screenwriter. I can write novels.
But at the same time, I have trouble keeping things out of books, which is why I don’t write short stories because they turn into novels.
At a certain point my novels set. They set just as hard as that jam jar. And then I know they are finished.
I could have been a cult writer if I’d kept writing surrealistic novels. But I wanted to break into the mainstream, so I had to prove that I could write a realistic book.
‘Shantaram’ is the second in the series of a quartet of novels that I have planned about my life but is the first to be written. The third book is a sequel to ‘Shantaram,’ the first a prequel.
The actual Blue Rose murders, which lie at the core of the three novels, yield various incorrect solutions which assume the status of truth.
On that other novels followed: but I still wrote fairy tales and dreamy poems of another world.
Whatever happened to books? Suddenly everybody’s talking about these 100-hour movies called ‘Breaking Bad’. People are talking about TV the same way they used to talk about novels back in the 1980s. I like to think I hang out with some pretty smart people, but all they talk about is ‘Breaking Bad.’
