If one book's done this well, you want to write another one that does just as well. There's that horror of the second novel that doesn't match up.
I don't mean that literary fiction is better than genre fiction, On the contrary; novels can perform two functions and most perform only one.
There are metaphysical problems, problems of human existence, that philosophy has never known how to grasp in all their concreteness and that only the novel can seize.
As I stood there absorbing Hammett's novel, the slot machines at the back of the shop were clanking and whirring, and in the billiard room upstairs the perpetual poker game was being played.
The world is full of novels in which characters simply say and do. There are certainly legitimate genres in which this is sufficient. But in real and lasting writing the character is.
My first film goes into production in October. It's called White Boy Shuffle and it's based on a novel about a young black kid and it's sort of reminiscent of Catcher in the Rye.
I wonder if we are all wrong about each other, if we are just composing unwritten novels about the people we meet?
All of my problems are rather complicated - I need an entire novel to deal with them, not a short story or a movie. It's like a personal therapy.
In a culture defined by shades of gray, I think the absolute black and white choices in dark young adult novels are incredibly satisfying for readers.
It'd be impossible to capture the feel of 'All Quiet on the Western Front' in a novel starring Mace Windu; 'All Quiet' is a tragic coming-of-age story.
If I'm hanging around too much, my wife and kids say, 'Hey, why don't you go downstairs and start a new novel?'
It is quite possible--overwhelmingly probable, one might guess--that we will always learn more about human life and personality from novels than from scientific psychology
The short story is still like the novel's wayward younger brother, we know that it's not respectable - but I think that can also add to the glory of it.
If someone had told me in high school that one day I'd write an historical novel, I would have rolled my eyes.
'Out' was my real breakthrough, the novel that became a hit in Japan and sold a lot of books, so it was sort of an obvious choice for being the first book to be translated into English.
I begin every novel with the vow that I will not write about technology, Catholicism, or Hell. As you know, I end up writing about all three. They just happen to be personal obsessions of mine.
I try to hurt myself, to sprain something, writing every novel and story, because I'm stretching for something new and difficult that I haven't done before.
Living in an entirely different physical as well as biotic environment, such a population would have unique opportunities to enter new niches and to select novel adaptive pathways.
Imogen was a bright girl naturally, but she had read so many novels that her brain was completely turned.
If I had killed Crow off I can think of least six novels I would never have written, 400,000 words' worth of very necessary experience.
Read with care, George Orwell's diaries, from the years 1931 to 1949, can greatly enrich our understanding of how Orwell transmuted the raw material of everyday experience into some of his best-known novels and polemics.
