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.
The best novels are those that are important without being like medicine; they have something to say, are expansive and intelligent but never forget to be entertaining and to have character and emotion at their centre.
You hear the best stories from ordinary people. That sense of immediacy is more real to me than a lot of writerly, literary-type crafted stories. I want that immediacy when I read a novel.
You always try to do your own thing. One of the things I wanted to do was to write a book that combines some of the best traits of contemporary fantasy with some of the traits of the historical novel.
The best novel I wrote was one called 'Crusoe's Daughter,' which never won any prizes. But I was getting somewhere in that. I'm not sure I have in any of the others.
I read a lot of literary theory when I was in graduate school, especially about novels, and the best book I ever read about endings was Peter Brooks' 'Reading for the Plot. '
Why would a novel - which is all about the inward processes of people's developing feelings and developing relationships - why would you be able to portray that in pictures with as few words as possible, which is what the best films are?
It’s comforting to me,” he added, “that beauty can come from violence, if only in metaphor.
One cannot read a novel without ascribing to the heroine the traits of the one we love.
I think it took me half a page of 'Wolf Hall' to think: 'This is the novel I should have been writing all along.'
I try to write about things, places, events, and phenomena I know about personally. That helps make the novels more genuine.
I think I would explode in flames of irony if I were to option an idea that I was satirizing in a novel.
It seems to me that you would have to write a novel on a very small, intimate scale for it not to become political.
White people use their literature to maintain culture. That's why you find references to Milton and Spencer and Shakespeare and Dostoyevsky in contemporary novels.
Well, writing was what I wanted to do, it was always what I wanted to do. I had novels to write so I wrote them.
I'm omnivorous in my tastes, fiction and non-fiction, always several books on the go, though I'll read a novel in a day or two.
I have been attacked in Turkey more for my interviews than for my books. Political polemicists and columnists do not read novels there.
The English novels are the only relaxation of the intellectually unemployed. But one should not be too severe on them. They show a want of knowledge that must be the result of years of study.
No novel is a clone of any preceding one, though with a background cast of characters and things that has grown to thousands, there are many familiar aspects.
I think you can tell when you meet someone whether they read novels. There's some hollowness if they don't.
The function of the novel is the exploration of the human condition. Really, that's what it's all about.
