A Quote by Alvaro Enrigue

I don't write historical novels but novels that wonder, 'And what if it happened in this way and not in this other one?' — © Alvaro Enrigue
I don't write historical novels but novels that wonder, 'And what if it happened in this way and not in this other one?'
I write my novels personally, desperately and non-negligently. When I write my novels, I think about my novels only, and never do other works.
I think there's a false division people sometimes make in describing literary novels, where there are people who write systems novels, or novels of ideas, and there are people who write about emotional things in which the movement is character driven. But no good novels are divisible in that way.
If you write a book set in the past about something that happened east of the Mississippi, it's a 'historical novel.' If you write about something that took place west of the Mississippi, it's a 'Western'- and somehow regarded as a lesser work. I write historical novels about the frontier.
In Pakistan, many of the young people read novels because in the novels, not just my novels but the novels of many other Pakistani writers, they encounter ideas, notions, ways of thinking about the world, thinking about their society that are different. And fiction functions in a countercultural way as it does in America and certainly as it did in the, you know, '60s.
I write novels, mostly historical ones, and I try hard to keep them accurate as to historical facts, milieu and flavor.
I write what I want to write. Period. I don't write novels-for-hire using media tie-in characters, I don't write suspense novels or thrillers. I write horror. And if no one wants to buy my books, I'll just keep writing them until they do sell--and get a job at Taco Bell in the meantime.
There were a lot of adventure books for boys, historical novels by Kenneth Roberts, and whatever mystery novels the alarmed librarian imagined might not corrupt an eager but innocent youth.
I don't write fantasy; I write historical novels about an imaginary place.
When I was working on a Victorian-era novel, to get in the mood, I read several historical novels set in approximately the same period and place, and really enjoyed the detective novels of John Dickson Carr.
There are many reasons I love novels with multiple narratives. In novels where the events are filtered through the consciousness of a single 'reliable' narrator, I often wonder, is this the whole story? What could be missing here?
Movies are not novels, and that's why, when filmmakers try to adapt novels, particularly long or complex novels, the result is almost always failure. It can't be done.
I wrote my first two long novels and an anthology of short narratives, when I was a manager of my own jazz bar. There was not enough time to write and I didn't know how to write novels. Therefore, I made written collages of aphorisms and rags.
My first attraction to writing novels was the plot, that almost extinct animal. Those novels I read which made me want to be a novelist were long, always plotted, novels - not just Victorian novels, but also those of my New England ancestors: Herman Melville and Nathaniel Hawthorne.
Novels ought to have hope; at least, American novels ought to have hope. French novels don't need to. We mostly win wars, they lose them. Of course, they did hide more Jews than many other countries, and this is a form of winning.
The central question driving literary aesthetics in the age of the iPad is no longer 'How should novels be?' but 'Why write novels at all?'
I'm not writing novels, the screenplays are my novels, so I'm gonna write it the best that I can. If the movie never gets made, it'd almost be okay because I did it. It's there on the page.
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