The Novel Quotes
Only in novels can we take another human being into our head and create something jointly.
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.
If it takes you seven years to write each novel, you need a patron. And I would rather have my corporate self as my patron than any arts council or bestower of grants.
Novel writing is the slowest art form in the world. It is not a sprint. It is not even a marathon. It is a series of marathons that stretch over and over across a continent.
When people talk about the death of the novel, they are speaking of the need for the birth of something different.
Writing a novel is like an amusement park or a museum or a city. You go into that place and you have certain experiences and those experiences, hopefully, have some impact on you.
I think people assume that women write about the domestic sphere. Women write about relationships and family. Men do, too, but then it's the Great American Novel.
A novel may take anywhere from two to five years to write and, in the end, you might manage a couple of thousand dollars on it, no more.
If you're writing a novel, you're in a room for three or four years. There's not much coming in from the outside.
First of all, all writing includes some part of the self. The relationship of the self and the other exists in writing, whether autobiographical or novel. There is a self and an other.
I went into journalism in a grandiose way. I thought maybe I'd do a little journalism whilst I write the great novel of all time you see -- one has to keep oneself afloat.
Plot is tremendously important to me: I can't stand books where nothing happens, and I can't imagine ever writing a novel without at least one murder.
The reason I start a novel is because there's something that excites me and I want to explore it.
I started my first novel when I was 10, and have produced thousands of pages of juvenilia since.
It seems to me that the basic plot of all historical novels is a romance swept aside by history.
I've never really understood that whole thing of writers avoiding other writers' novels while they're working on their own.
Most people can start a short story or a novel. If you're a writer, you can finish them. Finish enough of them, and you may be good enough to be publishable.
A disturbing novel about dreams and wishes, a nightmarish distaff monkey's paw of a book that it's impossible to forget. Lisa Tuttle remains our preeminent chronicler of family madness and desire.
A novel seemed the easiest way to get what I had had in my head into the inside of other people's heads. Books are good that way.
The search for the word gets no easier but nobody else is going to write your novel for you.
You can tell the date of an old science fiction novel by every word on the page. Nothing dates harder and faster and more strangely than the future.
I kept starting 'Anansi Boys' as a movie and stopping, and eventually wrote the novel and was happy.
With American Gods I was trying very, very consciously - there was a level at which it was a little like trying to write a novel in French - you know, "this novel is to be written in American."
In a novel, you can always go back and make it look like you knew what you were doing all along before the thing goes out and gets published.
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.
In the summer of 2010, I was working on a version of "True Detective" that I was thinking might be my next novel, and it was told in these two first-person voices; Cohle and Hart's voices.
The idea that a student can write a sonnet or a novel without having a sound understanding about its history, and where it fits into literature as a whole, seems to me to be manifestly daft.
What's the challenge in writing a novel that few people will read? I'm more than happy writing what I do and have no plans to change that.
In the end, for me, the sole single goal is to write the best novel that I can. Whether or not it gets made or gets purchased.
What I try to do with any of my stories, any of my novels, is make them feel very original.
Usually, I start thinking about my next novel soon after completing the latest, and it can take anywhere from a month to 6 months to come up with a story.
The movies are fun, but I'm a novelist. In many ways, screenwriting is much easier than writing novels. I find screenplays twenty times easier to write than a novel.
The job of the novel is to be true to the confusion, but not so confusing that you turn the reader off.
In the novel, I can change things and simplify, and make events work towards whatever meanings I'm trying to get at more efficiently.
My first novel, 'Man Walks Into a Room,' is about a man who's lost his memory and has to start a second life. On one level, it's about how we create a coherent sense of self.
What interests me in writing a novel is taking really remote voices, characters, and stories and beginning to create some kind of web.
Part of the work of writing a novel is to uncover the symmetries or connections that make it whole, which might not reveal itself at first.
I'm good with a grill. I like to make cheeseburgers - I once read in a David Goodis crime novel that you're only supposed to flip a burger once.