There are plenty of bad editors who try to impose their own vision on a book. (…) A good novel editor is invisible.
As an adolescent I wrote comic books, because I read lots of them, and fantasy novels set in Malaysia and Central Africa.
Narrativity presumes a special taste for plot. And this taste for plot was always very present in the Anglo-Saxon countries and that explains their high quality of detective novels.
Entering a novel is like going on a climb in the mountains: You have to learn the rhythms of respiration - acquire the pace. Otherwise you stop right away.
I don't write tracts, I write novels. I'm not a preacher, I'm a fiction writer.
The creative process is beautiful and magical thing. Whether its a song, a radio story, or a novel, it all springs from the same place in the heart.
Every novel is an attempt to capture time, to weave something solid out of air. The author knows it is an impossible task - that is why he keeps on trying.
...While I rather doubt whether, as has often been claimed, everyone has at least one novel inside them, it is undeniably true of ...
Writers don't just create pages in a novel, but depth to worlds that become a safe haven for those who wish to escape the reality of their own.
Figuring out the secret of the universe is like trying to read a brand after the steer's been made into hamburger." ~Will Durham from Crossroads, A Music Novel
Great novels are above all great fairy tales . . . literature does not tell the truth but makes it up.
What novels do that biographies don't is get at truths by penetrating the facts, by going deeper to what's underneath fact, through invention.
We are material creatures who spend much of our lives on material pursuits (even building a cathedral or writing a novel requires stone and mortar or paper and ink).
So many Indian novels, quite unfairly, do not get the prominence they should because they have been written in a language other than English.
Among the many problems which beset the novelist, not the least weighty is the choice of the moment at which to begin his novel.
The ear tends to be lazy, craves the familiar and is shocked by the unexpected; the eye, on the other hand, tends to be impatient, craves the novel and is bored by repetition.
Film is a medium of clear lines and broad strikes - which can be fantastic - but compared to the subtleties and nuances of a novel, it doesn't even get close.
When I start writing a novel, I have no sense of direction, no idea, really nothing.
In the face of the obscene, explicit malice of the jungle, which lacks only dinosaurs as punctuation, I feel like a half-finished, poorly expressed sentence in a cheap novel.
HBO and I have a deal to at least try to make a television series from the Leonid McGill stories. We're going to start with the first novel, 'The Long Fall.'
I would sooner read a time-table or a catalogue than nothing at all. They are much more entertaining than half the novels that are written.
