I could hardly wait for following chapters, which arrived in dribs and drabs, and I began to feel for all the world like the young T.B. Macaulay walking from London to meet the Cambridge coach bearing the next installment of Waverley novels.
Many people have compared me to the Victorian adventure writer, Rider Haggard. I accept that as a compliment. As a boy growing up in Central Africa I read all Haggard's African novels.
Nabokov, who I loved more than any other writer when I was young, had such contempt for dialogue. When I was younger, I never wrote a word of dialogue because of him. I thought it was a childish part of a novel.
Let's put it this way: if you are a novelist, I think you start out with a 20 word idea, and you work at it and you wind up with a 200,000 word novel. We, picture-book people, or at least I, start out with 200,000 words and I reduce it to 20.
When I'm writing a novel or doing other serious writing work, I do it on a schedule that dictates writing either 2,000 words a day or writing until noon. After I hit whichever mark comes first, then I can give my attention to everything else I have t...
I carry my liberty with me. It is in my thoughts, in my head. Shakespeare is one of my countries, Goethe another. You can change that badge that I wear, but you can’t change the way I think. It is through my intellect that I can escape the roles, i...
His father was IRA and his mother was Quebecois, and they had reliquished their mortal coils in the internecine conflagration that ended their conjoined separatist movement, IRA-Q. The appellation he was given by his progenitors was Ray O'Vaque ("Lik...
I do not like postmodernism, postapocalyptic settings, postmortem narrators, or magic realism. I rarely respond to supposedly clever formal devices, multiple fonts, pictures where they shouldn't be—basically, gimmicks of any kind. I find literary f...
As I stared at him, elation,excitement, and lust began exploding within me like a fireworks display, rising within and bursting with a range of exquisite emotion that I had never known existed, let alone experienced, leaving me breathless, nervous, a...
He saw a cross on a wall with another cross behind it, a shadow cross, the shadow of what God left behind when God was gone, the continued need for joy and beauty, a commitment to hope where there appeared to be none, and to grace in spite of everyth...
What reader or dreamer doesn’t imagine the romantic life of a writer, who lingers between the desk and the fridge in the morning and in the evening attends cocktail parties thrown by nouveaux riches and the society ladies who hardly ever have the t...
Like James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916), Woolf ’s first novel is a self-conscious meditation on the formation of an emergent intellectual and artist (a Ku¨nstlerroman).
You be able to write a novel, you may . You will never know until you have worked very hard indeed and written at least part of it. You will never know until you have written the whole of it and submitted it for publication.
Someone ought to write a novel about me,” said Lebedeva loftily. “I shouldn’t care if they lied to make it more interesting, as long as they were good lies, full of kisses and daring escapes and the occasional act of barbarism. I can’t abide ...
Novel writing is mostly triage (this now, that later) and obstinacy. Trying something, and when that doesn't work, trying something else. Welcoming clutter Surrendering a good idea for a better one. Knowing you won't find the finish line for a year o...
V-Day…if you need this one day in a year to show everyone else you truly care for “your loved one” I think it’s quite stupid. I hate this commercialism. It’s all artificial, and has nothing to do with real love.
Not the least of the hardships to which the dying are subject is the visitation of their loved ones. The poor darlings, God bless them, may feel every impulse to condole and console, but their primary sensation is nonetheless one of embarrassment in ...
To THOSE who want to lift this nation from the dungheap of history, the past does not matter — only the present, the awareness of the deadening rot which surrounds and suffocates us, and what we must do to vanquish it.
Neither novels or their readers benefit from any attempts to divine whether any facts hide inside a story. Such efforts attack the very idea that made-up stories can matter, which is sort of the foundational assumption of our species.
Danny: I’m a bit jealous, Sheila. Sheila: Are you, my dear? What on earth for? Danny: Well, because you’ve really lived, Sheila. Sheila: Of course I have, Daniel. What else is life for?
I'll have you understand the United States has got the best navy in the world." "Well, . . . why, then, do we need a bigger navy?" "We've got to have a still bigger navy because we're the richest nation on earth.
