As for literary criticism in general: I have long felt that any reviewer who expresses rage and loathing for a novel or a play or a poem is preposterous. He or she is like a person who has put on full armor and attacked a hot fudge sundae or a banana...
That mess about judging people by the content of their character and not the color of their skin—that's some bullshit. Nobody has the right to judge anybody else. Period. If you ain't been in my skin, you ain't never gonna understand my character.
RE: Kindle, iPad, et cetera: For a researcher, these new ways of accessing information are just extraordinary. I thing it introduces the possibility of a new standard of cognitive exactness and precision. ~ Rebecca Goldstein, author of Properties of ...
In the spring and summer I watched my plants flower, but it was, perhaps, in winter that I loved them best, when their skeletons were exposed. Then I felt they had more to say to me, were not simply dressing themselves for the crowds. Stripped of the...
We’re novel worthy, day walking, blood sucking, tortured souls trapped in a body that can’t die for all eternity with no feelings, no emotions and no heart. - Elaine White, Runaway Girl
When Stephen King elaborated on his inspirations for his novel "Carrie" he draws from a time when he was a young man, and describes his impression when he came upon a statue of Christ on the cross, hanging there in misery, and he thought
(T)here are worse things than falling on your face right out of college...Like instant, unearned success. Like getting your first novel accepted by the first publisher you send it to. Like getting your first rejection slip at the age of thirty-five.
I’m alive. This might be the first time I’ve ever really been alive in my whole fucking miserable life. This moment is what causes wars to start. The only books worth reading have been written about those lips.
I really didn't write it with any intention of being published. If I'd known that was going to happen, I would have written something more sensible, because now I have to dress up as a pirate for book signings... I would have done a novel about a man...
Let's get right to it: On page 5 of Paul Murray's dazzling new novel, 'Skippy Dies,'... Skippy dies. If killing your protagonist with more than 600 pages to go sounds audacious, it's nothing compared with the literary feats Murray pulls off in this h...
It's certainly a cliche to remark that a nonfiction book 'reads just like a novel,' but in the case of Jonathan Eig's 'The Birth of the Pill,' I have no other recourse, since his narrative is full of larger-than-life characters sharply limned and emb...
A news junkie, I read, daily, the 'Times/Sunday Times,' the 'Guardian/Observer,' 'Mail,' and the 'Argus' - both to keep up with crime in Brighton, where I set my novels, and because I think it is vital to support local papers - they provide a unique ...
Some critics said, 'Hey, why are you writing historical novels?' I say they're not historical, they're contemporary, because people walking around who lived through this, even a little bit, they carry it inside. The contemporary isn't just what you c...
I always find the first thing that really bothers me when I start a screenplay is, I have to find a different form. You can't follow the form of the novel. It's a different thing completely. It's impossible. You just somehow have to find a structure ...
I have tried to create main characters who are drastically different from the types who generally appear in crime novels. Mikael Blomkvist, for instance, doesn't have ulcers or booze problems or an anxiety complex. He doesn't listen to operas, nor do...
I think, in a written novel, the way in which you play with the readers' emotion or the way in which you engage the readers' emotions can be very indirect. You could come at it through irony or comedy, etcetera, and you could capture people's sympath...
My English teachers gave me a copy of Atwood's 'The Handmaid's Tale' when I left high school, which has always been very special to me - it was the novel that introduced me to dystopian fiction. I'm also influenced by Edgar Allan Poe, Dickens, John W...
10. Never allow your imagination to stop. It was the imagination of great people that brought us the internet, the pyramids, cars, airplanes, boats, great novels, beautiful painting, classical songs, great movies, water irrigation, solar panels, the ...
I am really Chloe Anthony Wofford. That's who I am. I have been writing under this other person's name. I write some things now as Chloe Wofford, private things. I regret having called myself Toni Morrison when I published my first novel, .
I usually start writing a novel that I then abandon. When I say abandon, I don't think any writer ever abandons anything that they regard as even a half-good sentence. So you recycle. I mean, I can hang on to a sentence for several years and then put...
The seed for my novel 'Half Brother' was planted in my mind over twenty years ago, but didn't germinate until late 2007 when I came across the obituary for Washoe, an extraordinary chimpanzee who had learned over 250 words of American Sign Language.
