Art is not like other culture because its success is not made by its audience. The public fill concert halls and cinemas every day, we read novels by the millions, and buy records by the billions. 'We the people'--affect the making and quality of mos...
I spent most of the '60s, when I was starting to try to write novels, living and working in Greece and Turkey. These are countries where the ancient past is interfused with the daily present, and I remember being struck with wonder at the constant se...
You can't really succeed with a novel anyway; they're too big. It's like city planning. You can't plan a perfect city because there's too much going on that you can't take into account. You can, however, write a perfect sentence now and then. I have.
When I was very little, four or five, I did comic strip drawings, so my first novel had no words. I couldn't write and thought adult handwriting was a mysterious scribble. When I was 14, my grandmother gave me a typewriter and I started writing in a ...
In my office in Florida I have, I think, 30 manuscript piles around the room. Some are screenplays or comic books or graphic novels. Some are almost done. Some I'm rewriting. If I'm working with a co-writer, they'll usually write the first draft. And...
There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old’s life: and One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to...
But then it came time for me to make my journey—into America. [... N]o coincidence that my first novel is called . That became my subject, the subject that shaped my work. When I get a French translation of one of my books that says 'translated fro...
My cure for writer's block is to step away from the thing I'm stuck on, usually a novel, and write something totally different. Besides fiction, I write poetry, screenplays, essays and journalism. It's usually not the writing itself that I'm stuck on...
The one author who has influenced my writing the most is the English writer John Fowles, who wrote 'The French Lieutenant's Woman,' 'The Magus,' 'The Collector,' and other novels. None of his books is like any other. He continually challenges himself...
I started writing short stories. I tried writing horror, mystery, science fiction. I joined a little critique group here in town and ran my stories past them. After about three years, I tackled my first novel, Subterranean. It took me 11 months to wr...
I was writing novels at eight. It was a science fiction epic, which went by the unimprovable title of 'Another Kind of Warrior.' I'd write it beginning to end, but when I'd finished it, I was another year older. The quality of writing and thought cha...
Jennings: Teaching is just a way to pay the bills until I finish my novel. Boon: How long you been workin' on it? Jennings: Four and a half years. Pinto: It must be very good. Jennings: It's a piece of shit. Would anyone like to smoke some pot?
I do believe that characters in novels belong to their writers and their readers pretty equally. I've learned a lot of things about the characters I write from people who read about them. Readers expand them in ways I don't think of and take them to ...
I was desperately shy when I was wee. Totally lacked confidence socially. When I look back at school photographs, I'm always the one shrinking in the back. What I really wanted to do was become a writer, and I don't think the residue of that has ever...
When I write short fiction or novellas, I like to leave a hint of the fantastic, of the unreal. If you write a completely fantastic novel with ghosts and everything, the effect is less powerful than if you portray an absolutely realistic situation an...
I was very influenced by The Magic Mountain. It's a book that had a huge impact on me. I loved that as a shape for a novel: put a bunch of people in a beautiful place, give them all tuberculosis, make them all stay in a fur sleeping bag for several y...
But now we live in a time and in a culture when mystery tends to mean something more answerable, it means a crime novel, a thriller, a drama on TV, usually one where we'll find out - and where the whole point of reading it or watching it will be that...
Many of us can't go home again, whether home is Seville, Cabo Sur, Nastas, Havana, or Kansas City. Thus, we must recognize that home really lies in the eternal peace, dormant or conscious, that dwells in each human heart... Quote from "Ms. Quixote Go...
Readers are distrustful and, although they accept the rules of the proposed game upon entry, they remain on the lookout for the slightest contradiction and often allow their own prejudices to lead them astray. When they have an openly autobiographica...
A good part of the physical attraction [between the hero and heroine of a romance novel] comes to life during these exchanges as well, since language creates a meeting of the minds. I have long thought that these lines of dialogue carve out the lines...
All my books are made up of other books. They're all deeply structured on other fiction, because I was a student in fiction and I didn't have much actual living to draw on. I suspect a lot of other people's novels are like that, too, though they migh...
