I keep waiting for the day in which everyone who loves 'Downton Abbey' will realize they were actually watching a historical romance novel.
To this day, 'The Duke and I' remains particularly close to my heart; I felt it was the novel in which my writing took a huge leap forward.
I can't imagine a romance novel published today where the hero rapes the heroine and she falls in love with him.
I was always attracted to taking a novel position, but one grounded in the materials I'd been given, not made up out of whole cloth.
'Game of Thrones' is taking dense novels and trying to shrink it all down to a slightly manageable series in the sense that there are so many characters and so many locations.
I'm a big fan of Elmore Leonard, and I've read Ian Rankin, Christopher Brookmyre and so on. But I'd never read a crime novel that made me feel emotional at the end.
Most publishers seem very reluctant to publish short story collections at all; they bring them out in paperback, often disguised as novels.
When I was sixteen, I wrote the first hundred or so pages of a novel about a piano that was haunted by the ghost of an evil blues musician.
I began visiting Lima's prisons back in 2007, when my first novel, 'Lost City Radio,' was published in Peru.
I think the idea of creating a character from scratch, one that has not been done in a novel or an existing story, is immensely exciting, terrifying and ultimately rewarding.
A certain luxury when you get to writing a novel is to have the space to have your characters just banter.
I may have one more 'Star Trek' novel in me, but it would be in the old universe, not the new one.
Journalism can go right up to the door of the room in which the decisions are made. A novel can go inside the room - and inside the character's heads.
I couldn't resist hiding some historical details and a few clues relevant to the plot and characters of 'A Discovery of Witches' throughout the pages of the novel.
I really enjoy writing novels. It's like the ocean. You can just build a boat and take off.
But novels are never about what they are about; that is, there is always deeper, or more general, significance. The author may not be aware of this till she is pretty far along with it.
The novel is the highest form of human expression so far attained. Why? Because it is so incapable of the absolute.
More of 'The Bourne Identity's script was taken from the events of the Iran Contra, which my father investigated for the Senate, than what was taken from Robert Ludlum's novel.
Novels give you the matrix of emotions, give you the flavour of a time in a way formal history cannot.
Novels are forged in passion, demand fidelity and commitment, often drive you to boredom or rage, sleep with you at night.
I spend eight months outlining and researching the novel before I begin to write a single word of the prose.
