I have been incredibly lucky with my novels but I had absolutely no idea if anyone would be interested in a cookbook. So I started to think about self-publishing.
Novels are pirated all the time, but it's hard to imagine that you're at work and you open up the attachment that your brother sent you and it's the new Phillip Roth novel.
The question I hate the most is "How did you DO it - write novels and raise your children simultaneously!" I mean, do MALE authors get asked that??
'Rainwater' was particularly special because it was a complete departure from the suspense novels. It's set in the Great Depression and based on an incident that occurred when my dad was a boy.
When I start writing these 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.
The truth is that every true admirer of the novels cherishes the happy thought that he alone - reading between the lines - has bcome the secret friend of their author.
My novels about medieval Wales were set in unexplored terrain; my readers did not know what lay around every bend in the road.
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.
Political novels are full of pitfalls, particularly for a novelist with strong political leanings.
We trust to novels to train us in the practice of great indignations and great generosity.
The best crime novels are all based on people keeping secrets. All lying - you may think a lie is harmless, but you put them all together and there's a calamity.
I am concerned that people who admire [Ayn] Rand are not often critical enough of the extent to which she has abridged the implications of [her] novels.
I always tell my students, 'If you walk around with your eyes and ears open, you can't possibly live long enough to write all the novels you'll encounter.'
"Novels and gardens," she says. "I like to move from plot to plot."
I want a career writing these novels that I can be proud of. And then I want one as a screenwriter.
The fact is that most crime novels contain a good many punchlines. They are just rather darker than the ones you might hear in a comedy club.
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.
She was the amoureuse of all the novels, the heroine of all the plays, the vague “she” of all the poetry books.
If I really considered myself a writer, I wouldn't be writing screenplays. I'd be writing novels.
Movies and novels, the two things that informed and taught me the most, are forms of escapism. I thought that was how life could look if you wanted it to.
Almost all novels are improved by cutting from the top. On their first pages, authors parade those favourite effects which disgust the impartial reader.
That's why I love crime novels so much: When I write a crime novel, the conflict is built in.
I've written something like 17 novels, which isn't bad, I suppose, but my father wrote 120 books, my mother 40. In comparison, I'm lazy.
Novels for me are how I find out what's going on in my own head. And so that's a really useful and indeed critical thing to do when you do as many of these other things as I do.
Most publishers seem very reluctant to publish short story collections at all; they bring them out in paperback, often disguised as novels.
I make a rod for my own back because people see my novels as quasi documentaries. But it is never history that's the main event of my books. It's my characters.
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.
When you're doing characters from famous novels, you have a responsibility as an actor to make it what the writer intended. And then you add and expand from there to create a three-dimensional performance.
Every author really wants to have letters printed in the papers. Unable to make the grade, he drops down a rung of the ladder and writes novels.
I don't write fantasy; I write historical novels about an imaginary place.
Many of the comedies I had made in Sweden were slightly based on semi-autobiographical experiences, so adapting novels was a very different experience.
When Joseph Wambaugh writes about the LAPD, you listen because you know he knows the scene. Lots of people write cop novels, but they don't have that authenticity.
My view is that comic books are meant to be long-form stories. They're meant to be novels.
I know 'Valerian' didn't do very well in America, but I think it's because of the lack of knowledge of these graphic novels which came out in the mid-60s.
Even though I got a late start, first publishing an essay when I was 50 years old, I've since written eight suspense novels.
I prefer all but the very worst travel books, to all but the very best novels.
When I began writing novels, I read Aristotle to learn how to perfect structure, Pearl Cleage to sustain tension, and Nora Roberts for characterization.
I almost always use first person voice in my novels. It has its limitations, but it gives a sense of immediacy that's hard to create with an anonymous, all-seeing narrator.
I wrote about four novels before I wrote a word of journalism.
Perhaps, all writers walk such a line. In general - as we all do in our dreams - I believe I put something of myself into all the characters in my novels, male as well as female.
I would write these novels about bullies in school: 'The Bullies: a Novel.'
Not merely one of the finest fantasy novels of recent years, but one of the finest ever. Should not be missed
We are not quite novels. We are not quite short stories. In the end, we are collected works
Rejection is part of the process, so you can't let it crush you. My first three novels never made it into publication, but my fourth, 'Sheltering Rain,' was translated into 11 languages.
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 have a great respect for people that write. I don't know how they do it every day... or do novels that they have to use their minds instead of just their memories. It's tough duty.
I've always been interested in those Orwellian dystopian novels, like 'Fahrenheit 451,' 'Brave New World,' and obviously Orwell's '1984.'
Life resembles a novel more often than novels resemble life.
My novels are always in Kannada because I express myself better in Kannada.
The novels that attract me most are those that create an illusion of transparency around a knot of human relationships as obscure, cruel, and perverse as possible.
A lot of first novels are coming-of-age stories. A lot are autobiographical.
I didn't read much of anything till I was 15, except Alistair MacLean and Michael Moorcock - the sword and sorcery novels - when I was about 13 or 14.
I'm used to adapting my novels for feature film - it can be challenging to cut and compress three or four hundred pages into two hours of dramatic action.
Dominant and emerging forms of interpersonal communication have to find their way into literary language somehow - think of the epistolary novels of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
Writing novels is so much more satisfying than writing television.
My entire career writing novels was wrapped up around Harry Bosch. This character was too important to me to just hand off.
It was always a false assumption that white American writers cannot write novels about race unless they're approaching it from a very oblique angle.
Few of us write great novels; all of us live them.
I think books in which people are really happy and things are going well are probably the most challenging novels there are to write, and there are very few of them.
I'm a novelist at heart. How's that? And that's how I make my living, is I write novels.
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