Some writers, no matter how good they are, can't speak to us. Something about the way they see the world, I think, string sentences together, alienates us as surely as the ramblings of a madman on a bus.
The two go hand in hand like a dance: chance flirts with necessity, randomness with determinism. To be sure, it is from this interchange that novelty and creativity arise in Nature, thereby yielding unique forms and novel structures.
Are you sorry? Do you wish you could do it all again and go off and write novels instead of being a teacher? No. You can’t trade what is for what might have been.
Starlets were always turning up dead in people's pools. They fished them out like goldfish. Nobody seemed to find it unusual that so many young, beautiful women wanted to die.
I was flipping channels, watching this cheerleading program on MTV. They took a field hockey girl and “transformed” her into a cheerleader by the end of the show. I was just wondering: what if she liked field hockey better?
Her love could stretch on unconditionally and endlessly, like it’s a universe within her. I’m drawn to the edge of that universe. I’d like to fall into a black hole of it somehow. I just whisper, “God.
I’m a survivor. And like the moon, I have a feeling it would take a truly spectacular event to keep me from taking my place in the scheme of things, waxing, waning, and eclipsing notwithstanding.
Djuna had wanted a life of desire and freedom, not luxury but beauty, not security but fulfillment, not perfection but a perfect moment like this one...
Do you know the one about how politics is show business for the ugly? State politics is show business for ugly people who can't remember their lines.
Seth: "I write of love in my novels, write of it well, if my critics and fans are to be believed, but in all of my years at that typewriter, I never found the combination of words that would convey how I felt about you. You were my everything.
If a novelist were so uncouth and possessed of so little moral sense that he should write of illicit love, his book would be barred from the public libraries and he woukd be ostracized by society.
The committees scour the bookstores, printing and publishing houses, paying particular attention to secondhand bookstores. There, they requisition countless copies of 'Incautious Maidens' or 'Flames at the Metropole.' So that those who prefer the fal...
Keep her downstairs a minute!' I breathed desperately. I don't know why; you don't want your agonies of soul witnessed by a woman. ("Nightmare")
I don't take much stock of detectives in novels - chaps that do things and never let you see how they do them. That's just inspiration: not business.
Some say it is the elements of hope and wonder in children's books that make them special. But there are many dark young adult novels these days. Adults loved Harry Potter, though it was written for the young. In the end, it is probably up to the rea...
My father was sleepless most of his life. So by the age of five, I was awake with him all night long, watching bad television or we'd lie in the same bed, and I'd read my comic books while he read his latest spy or mystery novel.
Cory Doctorow should be too busy for lunch. He's co-editor of, and a prolific contributor to, one of the most influential blogs in the world, Boing Boing. Over the past decade the Canadian-born writer has published 16 books, mostly science fiction no...
My first novel, 'The Lions of Lucerne,' just poured out of me. It was an amazing feeling of accomplishment. My biggest fear and therefore my biggest obstacle to becoming an author had been, 'What if I spend all that time and the book is no good?'
I never thought I would become amazing. I never thought I would be as great as my father. I would like to continue writing novels, and hopefully, at some point, I would like to make the switch from being 'Stephen Hawking's daughter' to 'novelist Lucy...
And I know I'm supposed to feel guilty for wanting people to buy my books... and books in general? Novels and poetry, they belong to the realm of art. How dirty of us to try to hawk art! But, after a decade of hand-wringing and apologies, I can't qui...
In my contemporary stories, I write about today's quilters, inventive techniques they use, and how technology has influenced their art. Novels set in the past let me have fun researching patterns that were popular and fabrics and tools available to q...
