A Quote by Kate Atkinson
A novel and its writer are inseparable: you are your books. A play's not like that at all. 'Abandonment's not mine - it's everyone's. I wanted it to be a co-operative thing because I was tired of that anal control that I have over novels.
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Growing up devouring horror comics and novels, and being inspired to become a writer because of horror novels, movies, and comic books, I always knew I was going to write a horror novel.
We had all these famous writers in Sweden and from all over the world home at dinner. I wanted to be a writer, and I wanted to be a highbrow writer as my father. He never, ever read anything like crime novels. He wrote biographies of Dante, James Joyce, August Strindberg and Joseph Conrad.
I can't be reading novels when I'm writing a novel, because somebody's voice creeps in. The hardest thing to do is keep the tone and your attitude over the course of a year or however long it takes.But when I'm writing short stories, which I will be doing shortly, I can read anything I like.
I had an idea for a medical conspiracy thriller. Since it was non-horror, I didn't want the publishers and editors bringing a lot of baggage - my history as a genre writer in the SF and horror fields, for instance - to the novel when they read it. I wanted them to consider the book solely on its own merits. So I called myself Colin Andrews. I was tired of seeing my books at floor level. Not that Herman Wouk and Phyllis Whitney and William Wharton are bad company, but I wanted to be up at eye level for a change, where people with bad backs could get a chance to see my books.
Why aren't crazy people content to take over, like, one town? It always has to be the whole word. They can't just control maybe twenty people. The have to control everyone. The can't just be stinking rich. The can't just do genetic experiments on a couple unlucky few. They have to put something in the water. In the air. To get everyone. I was tired of all of it.
Sometimes we hear it said that ten minutes on your knees will give you a truer, deeper, more operative knowledge of God than ten hours over your books. What! Than ten hours over your books on your knees?
In terms of age, I think I've covered about as wide a range as is possible, having written everything from picture books to early chapter books to middle grade novels to YA to one adult novel - and having been editor and lead writer for a magazine for retired people!
The truth about being a writer is you do not choose the stories you tell, but stories choose you. You do not choose, therefore, characters either. Novels are like dreams you dream with your eyes open; they are books which appear in your head with the same apparent immediateness as they appear in your dreams at night. A writer always writes their obsessions and the truth is that all throughout life we end up writing the same thing in different ways.
I don't have any answers as to whether the Internet is a good or a bad thing, but it's certainly an important thing for the novel because novels are so much about communication, and when communication changes, the novel has to change.
Much as I love stories, I think I'll only be satisfied with myself as a writer if I'm able to produce a novel that feels publishable. The books that truly take me away - for weeks at a time - are all novels.
I've always been a little bit more of a novel reader than a short story reader. I think the first books that made me want to be a writer were novels.
The age of the book is not over. No way... But maybe the age of some books is over. People say to me sometimes 'Steve, are you ever going to write a straight novel, a serious novel' and by that they mean a novel about college professors who are having impotence problems or something like that. And I have to say those things just don't interest me. Why? I don't know. But it took me about twenty years to get over that question, and not be kind of ashamed about what I do, of the books I write.
In a cricket career, your life is in some ways controlled for you. You have no control over schedules, you have no control about where you want to play, you don't have control over that as a cricketer.
I always wanted to be someone in the entertainment industry. In my eighth grade slideshow, when everyone was like "show us what you want to be," everyone [said] doctor, lawyer, [but] mine literally said rapper. I wanted to be a musician, I wanted to be a superstar, I wanted to be on stage, I wanted to perform, I wanted to be in movies. But as you grow up, those dreams kind of fade away.
Life isn't a romance novel. The truth is, the reason romance novels sell so well ---- the reason why everyone loves them ---- is because no one's life is actually like that. Everyone WANTS their life to be like that.
'Great Expectations' was an important novel in my adolescence. It was very much one of those emblematic novels that made me wish I could write like that. It helped that my models as a writer were dead over a hundred years before I began to write.
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