I have learned as much about writing about my people by listening to blues and jazz and spirituals as I have by reading novels.
I wonder if we are all wrong about each other, if we are just composing unwritten novels about the people we meet?
I used the pen name because I knew I wanted to write better novels under my own name someday.
I've tried very hard and I've never found any resemblance between the people I know and the people in my novels.
Why do we write novels or make television about real things? It's the human condition and human suffering.
For me to say that all novels in English written by Indians are all alike would be a bit like saying that all the cows in India look the same and have identical horns.
I have tried very hard as a novelist to say, 'Novels are about individuals and especially larger than life individuals.'
Architecture is a discipline that takes time and patience. If one spends enough years writing complex novels one might be able, someday, to construct a respectable haiku.
If a writer writes poems and short stories and novels, but nobody ever reads them, is she really a writer?
To Kill A Mockingbird is one of my favourite novels, my mum brought me up reading it, and it never fails to move me.
The idea that people in novels should be more sympathetic than people in life simply baffles me.
The violence and double-talk in the Alice books probably does no harm to children, but the novels should not be allowed to circulate indiscriminately among adults who are undergoing analysis.
Novels do take charge of the writer, and the writer is basically a kind of sheepdog just trying to keep things on track.
Writing is my number one passion. I've written two novels. I've written a screenplay. I also write short stories and poetry.
I've never really understood that whole thing of writers avoiding other writers' novels while they're working on their own.
I don't know if memoirs can produce literary work of the first order. But I do know that novels are doing it only rarely.
Movies have to handle time very efficiently. They're about stringing scenes together in the present. Novels aren't necessarily about that.
There are these boutique writers out there who think if they are not writing their novels sitting at a bistro with their laptops, then they're not real writers. That's ridiculous.
When I write my novels I don't really have a huge plan beforehand; I don't have the whole plot and architecture, so the story is sort of discovered as I write it.
We do seem, as a culture, to fetishize the "sweep." But I know there's room for "big" short, fierce novels, and "big" solid ones.
I think gaming has influenced popular culture in a huge way. It's worked its way into novels, and blockbuster movies.
If politicians can't do it, I want to do it. We have to do it. Artists, put it in paintings. Poets, put it in poems, novels. That's what we have to do. And I think it's so important to save the world.
Supposedly, some writers work in rowdy coffee shops or compose whole novels to Megadeth, but when I write, I wear a pair of chainsaw operator's earmuffs.
I haven't the stature to critique one of our literature's great novels, Tobias; and I'm not one of those who believe The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn needs critiquing for literary or social reasons.
Heaven knows, I've exposed myself in my novels through the use of fantasy and imagination... now my new book is about what really happened to me... not my heroines.
Nobody's made an impact like Raina Telgemeier or Kate Beaton. I think that indie creators, people making webcomics and graphic novels, are the ones to watch.
With the crime novels, it's delightful to have protagonists I can revisit in book after book. It's like having a fictitious family.
I think novels are profoundly autobiographical. If writers deny that, they are lying. Or if it's really true, then I think it's a mistake.
At a certain point my novels set. They set just as hard as that jam jar. And then I know they are finished.
For me, writing a novel is like solving a puzzle. But I don't intend my novels as puzzles. I intend them as invitations to dance.
With the crime novels, its delightful to have protagonists I can revisit in book after book. Its like having a fictitious family.
I'm a hopeful romantic who adores novels with happy endings, because there are enough sad endings in real life.
Even with the sacred printing press, we got erotic novels 150 years before we got scientific journals.
I think of myself as a softy. I think the 87th Precinct novels are very sentimental, and the cops are idealistic guys.
To ask a novelist to talk about his novels is like asking somebody to cook about their dancing.
Novels can be a snapshot of a moment in time, or several moments in time, and as a reader, that's what I really like, and as a writer, it's what I'm drawn to also.
Iris Murdoch did influence my early novels very much, and influence is never entirely good.
My Italian-American heritage, of which I'm very proud and with which I identify strongly, surfaces in several of my novels.
Hollywood called just as I crested thirty. My novels did not and still do not interest them, but my writing ability did.
There is nothing that's been in any of my novels that, in my view, hasn't been either illuminating surroundings or defining a character or moving a plot.
Romance is very pretty in novels, but the romance of a life is always a melancholy matter. They are most happy who have no story to tell.
If to live is to progress, if you are lucky, from foolishness to wisdom, then to write novels is to broadcast the various stages of your foolishness.
I try to stick with what moves me or teaches me about myself, same thing I hope the novels do for others.
I've read about eight or ten of the original novels, and one of them is where Maigret's in bed for the entire story! His wife is running around and solving the case!
We don't read novels to have an experience like life. Heck, we're living lives, complete with all the incompleteness. We turn to fiction to have an author assure us that it means something.
A publisher saw one of my historical novels and thought I would write an admirable detective story, so she offered me a two-book contract, and I grabbed it.
I had 'Push' and 'The Paperboy' next to my bed for many years. Those are some of the great, great novels.
Though my short stories are the more readable, my novels do have more to say; and they will, if anyone has the patience for it, repay a rereading.
All those words of praise they use for novels - spare, economical. Why should I shell out £17 for economical?
I was 35, had always wanted to write novels, and thought that I had better do it while I was young enough.
I also read modern novels - I have just had to read 60 as I am one of the judges for the Orange Fiction Prize.
Conspiracies and all the theories of conspiracy are a part of the canon of fakes. And I'm involved, in all of my writings, the theoretical ones as well as the novels, with the production of fakes.
My dad goes through war novels like I go through boxes of Cinnamon Toast Crunch.
Realistic novels simply pretend that the rules of their invented worlds are identical to the rules of actual life, but that's a ruse.
I write novels, mostly historical ones, and I try hard to keep them accurate as to historical facts, milieu and flavor.
The biggest book for me, when I was fifteen, was Crime and Punishment, which I read in a kind of fever. When I put it down, I thought, if this is what novels are then I want to be a novelist.
I have to read comic books all first, because now when you get into graphic novels, they are definitely in deep graphic.
Because I had grown up with Jane Austen novels and period dramas, I was very familiar with that period and that world.
Novels are the Socratic dialogues of our time. Practical wisdom fled from school wisdom into this liberal form.
Sometimes I felt like my columns were like little novels in themselves. But I wasn't writing what I believed. I'm not interested in what I believe.
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