Melvin Udall: [finishing his latest romance novel] "'You saved my life,' she said... 'You'd better make it up to me.'"
When I started, I was pretty sure I was going to be writing some goofy little wizard novels that might make me some part-time money and would hopefully lead to something I could do better.
If there's anything Trollope novels always take seriously, it is money - how it flows from one character to another, how it is managed, who has it, who deserves it, and what it means to a character, male or female.
Because I worked as a newspaper reporter for about 14 years before attempting my first novel, I learned to write under almost any circumstances- by candle light, in longhand, in African villages where there was no power, under shelling in Kurdistan.
Although many of his other novels are brilliant there is a power in 'Oliver Twist' that I believe Dickens never managed to retrieve. It is as if he was sent to this earth with the sole purpose of writing this book.
At the height of the British Empire very few English novels were written that dealt with British power. It's extraordinary that at the moment in which England was the global superpower the subject of British power appeared not to interest most writer...
Poetry always runs away from you - it's very difficult to grasp it, and every time you read it, depending on your conditions, you will have a different grasp of it. Whereas with a novel, once you have read it, you have grasped it.
I teach a lecture course on American poetry to as many as 150 students. For a lot of them, it's their only elective, so this is their one shot. They'll take the Russian Novel or American Poetry, so I want to give them the high points, the inescapable...
As a kid I wanted to write science fiction, and I was never without a book. Later I really got into being a scientist and never thought I'd be writing novels.
My science teachers always encouraged their classes to 'go out and discover something' because all scientific endeavors depend on observation and experimentation. Through such pursuits, anyone can find something new to science, and if it's truly nove...
Whenever I read a contemporary literary novel that describes the world we're living in, I wait for the science fiction tools to come out. Because they have to - the material demands it.
If you're going to kill someone there isn't much reason to get all worked up about it and angry - you just pull the trigger. Angry discussions beforehand are a waste of time. We need to smile at Novell while we pull the trigger.
I love mystery novels... I love seeing the dramas played out in academic departments, particularly English departments. I started reading these when I was going up for tenure.
I love writing journalism because it's all over in two hours and comes straight off the top of the head. Writing novels is soooooo much harder. It's the hardest thing I've ever done.
I also wanted to do something that I hadn't really seen in almost any black novels, which was a complex love story in which both people were extremely intelligent and talented and understood a lot of things and were still at odds getting it together.
I love research. Sometimes I think writing novels is just an excuse to allow myself this leisurely time of getting to know a period and reading its books and watching its films. I see it as a real treat.
People have quite a simple idea about 'Anna Karenina.' They feel that the novel is entirely about a young married woman who falls in love with a cavalry officer and leaves her husband after much agony, and pays the price for that.
I have always loved and avidly read the novels of Jack London, Jules Verne and Ernest Hemingway. The characters depicted in their books, who are brave and resourceful people embarking on exciting adventures, definitely shaped my inner self and nouris...
I was one of seven, and we took a lot of road trips - long road trips. And this was before iPhones and iPads and DVD players in cars. I remember how novel it was when I got my own Walkman so I could listen to music.
I've found myself at one in the morning just sitting at my desk spending an hour returning emails from the day until like two in the morning. It's ridiculous, I should be sleeping, or dreaming, or reading a novel.
I think the worst and most insidious procrastination for me is research. I will be looking for some bit of fact or figure to include in the novel, and before I know, I've wasted an entire morning delving into that subject matter without a word writte...
