Because I read so much nonfiction for work, I enjoy fiction most, especially detective novels and mysteries that keep me awake at night.
In this world, artists are joyous. Unpredictability is the life of their paintings, their music, their novels. They delight in events not forecasted, happenings without explanation, retrospective.
Most novels, if they are successful at all, are original in the sense that they report the existence of an area of society, a type of person, not yet admitted to the general literate consciousness.
Reading is a pleasure, yes, but not without effort: choosing to read novels purely because they mirror your own experience is stultifying.
One of the things that I love about crime novels is that you can turn the volume all the way up. If I can make somebody blow their subway stop, I win.
When I was young, about 18 or 19, I read all the Dostoyevsky novels, which made me want to go to St. Petersburg. So I went, and I was so inspired.
I've always had a compassion for characters in novels - the sense that they are, whatever they might think, living in a world that has a shape they don't know and can't finally alter.
Many of my works fall into the category of 'Zeitgeist novels'. Yet I hope that they aren't only reportage, but also attempts to convey the sense of the present to the future.
I fell in love with words in all languages, and I read everything I could find, particularly myths and legends and histories and archeology and any novels.
Most novels, I find, are three times longer than they need to be. Very little happens, and I don't want to waste my time with them.
Unfortunately, I don't get to read nearly as much as I want because I'm always working on my own stuff, either the novels or newspaper columns.
I'm very critical of crime novels that use gratuitous violence to shock readers when it isn't necessary. If that's all you have to offer as a writer, perhaps you're in the wrong job.
Of course the 19th century remained in blissful ignorance of post-modern irony, and the dime novels were made without end.
I continued writing the bad plays which fortunately nobody would produce, just as no one did me the unkindness of publishing my early novels.
And I used to write novels and little stories and compositions and I - but I put them away because I started acting when I was 17. So there wasn't much time.
I write crime novels and thrillers - I'm a big fan of cops. You can never forget that they run towards what everyone else runs away from.
Another thing I learned is that novels, even those from apparently distant times and places, remain current and enlightening, and also comforting.
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.
People assume that science is a very cold sort of profession, whereas writing novels is a warm and fuzzy intuitive thing. But in fact, they are not at all different.
I've worked out a Ninja Replacement Score for novels. It's basically the number of characters that need to be replaced by ninjas to make the book good.
There's one massive problem with coming from writing novels into screenplays that I've discovered over the years, which is that you've got too much facility on the page.
[Moralistic] novels are at the same disadvantage as teachers: children never believe them, because they make everything that happens relate to the lesson at hand.
So many Indian novels, quite unfairly, do not get the prominence they should because they have been written in a language other than English.
I write novels about ordinary women who face seemingly insurmountable odds, but through courage and determination find their heart's desire.
Many great novels have shown a world torn to shreds by the brutality of war. To do so, their authors ground their texts in the details of destruction and decay.
I came into screenwriting from an odd direction, because the first screenplay that I read was and is better as writing than the top one percent of literary novels.
My poems tend to be more celebratory and lyrical, and the novels so far pretty dark. Poetry doesn't seem to me to be an appropriate tool for exploring that.
Novels are sweets. All people with healthy literary appetites love them-almost all women; a vast number of clever, hardheaded men.
I've never taken any classes or had formal training in writing novels. At its most basic, I learned how to structure a novel.
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.
I have more than 100 legal pads filled with handwriting. Eight novels, two books for children, countless stories and essays.
How different from the cosy world of Rüya's detective novels, where authors never vexed a hero with more signs than he needed.
Often in gothic novels there's a large house, an estate, and it's symbolic of that culture. Usually it's sort of moldering or rotted or something, and sometimes it's a whole community.
Hope E. L .James doesn't think I'm being a prankster. I really want to adapt her novels for the screen. Christian Grey is a writer's dream.
I don't read novels whilst I'm writing one; I just haven't got a wide enough brain to concentrate on incoming and outgoing in the same time zone.
Readers of novels are a strange folk, upon whose probable or even possible tastes no wise book-maker would ever venture to bet.
I wanted to be a writer, but the idea of writing novels or movies seemed really intimidating. I never got more than a few pages into one.
There are similarities between historical novels and science fiction. Being thrown into the Napoleonic Wars is just as much of a different world as space.
To the question: How do the authors of sketches, stories and novels get along in life, the following answer can or must be given: They are stragglers and they are down at heel.
I didn't read Western novels much until I was in my twenties, but I had a diet of them on film and TV, as well as other things, of course.
I remember how I would wait for a play idea. I wasted a tremendous amount of time. I didn't realize that ideas could be made into movies or novels.
If I had the luxury of working as a full time writer, I think you would see novels appearing on a much more regular, and frequent, basis.
I like Victorian children's novels extremely a lot. If I would say I collect anything, that's what I'll hunt for now and again at old book stores.
For a century, women have binged on romance novels that encouraged them to associate intimidation with infatuation; it's no wonder that this emotional hangover still lingers.
As a kid, I dreamt of becoming a writer. My most exciting pastime was reading novels; in fact, I would read anything I could find.
I think most novelists I know, certainly including me, feel the novels choose them rather than vice-versa.
I suppose I'm proudest of my novels for what's imagined in them. I think the world of my imagination is a richer and more interesting place than my personal biography.
I had never heard of 'young adult novels,' which I guess are about teenage gangs and the new boy in town or something.
I like Jo Nesbo and Hakan Nesser. There are so many good books in the world. I don't want to spend time reading bad crime novels.
All novels attempt to cut neural routes through the brain, to convince us that down this road the true future of the novel lies.
I love grand scale. One of the things that everybody mentions is that my novels are beautiful objects in the sense that the elements of the actual book are being extruded and re-contextualized.
I read everything aloud, novels as well as picture books. I believe the eye and ear are different listeners. So as writers, we have to please both.
People used to expect literary novels to deepen the experience of living; now they are happy with any sustained display of writerly cleverness.
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.
I think novels just really show us the deepest parts of people's hearts, and you cannot walk away anymore and say, "I don't know."
I don't like novels that tie everything up in a plot-y way. I always think that's not really true of life, particularly of people in power.
In one deep sense, novels are concealed autobiography. I don't mean that you are telling facts about yourself, but you are trying to find out what you really think or who you are.
When I start writing novels, I go into them with a spirit of inquiry, rather than to substantiate prejudices I had in the beginning. If you don't do that, you can't write good characters.
Most gothics are overplotted novels whose success or failure hinges on the author's ability to make you believe in the characters and partake of the mood.
I read YA novels constantly, so I really want to be in a young adult rom-com, but I worry that I'm aging into the parent role, which is a little scary.
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