There are plenty of brilliant people who are too stressed out to read challenging literary novels.
Believe it or not, I sold my first novel, 'Crank,' with only seventy-five pages complete. It was in verse then, and it was hard-hitting then.
Writing a story is kind of like surfing, as opposed to the novel, where you use a GPS to get somewhere. With surfing, you kind of jump.
Writing a novel is like driving a car at night. You can only see as far as the headlights but you can make the whole trip that way.
Most novels I come across have all the excitement of a long trip on a bus with a sensitive glee club. Yammer and chat.
I think my novel, 'Walden Two,' has made people stop and look at the culture they have inherited and wonder if it is the last word or whether it can be changed.
I describe my works as books, but my publishers in Spain, in the United States, and elsewhere insist on calling them novels.
I still write the occasional short story, and poked at a novel once, but it's just not what I want to do.
The 'interactive fiction' format hasn't changed in any fundamental way since the early 1970s, in the same way that the format of the novel hasn't since 1700.
I think the novel form chose me. I was a writer before I became a criminal... my first instinct was to write.
For the novels I wrote before selling anything, I didn't outline much. I had a vague idea of the story.
I enjoy research; in fact research is so engaging that it would be easy to go on for years, and never write the novel at all.
The only obligation to which in advance we may hold a novel, without incurring the accusation of being arbitrary, is that it be interesting.
I really hate the term 'historical novel' - it reminds me of bodice-rippers. But I'm hooked on research, and I really, really enjoy it.
After 100 years, films should be getting really complicated. The novel has been reborn about 400 times, but it's like cinema is stuck in the birth canal.
I envy those writers who outline their novels, who know where they're going. But I find writing is a process of discovery.
Ever since the '70s, Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo were the godfathers of Scandinavian crime. They broke the crime novel in Scandinavia from the kiosks and into the serious bookstores.
You want a novel to tap as directly as possible into your most unspeakable preoccupations. And in America, in particular, cricket is pretty unspeakable.
There may well be writers who roll up their sleeves and say, 'I'm going to write a post-9/11 novel' but I wasn't one of those.
Before you can write a novel you have to have a number of ideas that come together. One idea is not enough.
Hating "The Great Gatsby" (the novel) is like spitting into the Grand Canyon. It will not be going away anytime soon, but you will be.
