I am not an academic who happens to have written a novel. I am a novelist who happens to be quite good academically.
I'm just trying to tell a good story and make thought-provoking, entertaining films. I just try and draw upon the great culture we have as a people, from music, novels, the streets.
The characters you refer to as predatory and unsavory are useful. They're the ones who make a novel into a thriller. They're active, and most of the common virtues, the signs of a good person, are not.
Hemingway is terribly limited. His technique is good for short stories, for people who meet once in a bar very late at night, but do not enter into relations. But not for the novel.
I don't much live my life as if I was living in a Raymond Chandler novel, which is probably a good thing.
I wrote a novel for my degree, and I'm very happy I didn't submit that to a publisher. I sympathize with my professors who had to read it.
All human states are organic brain states - happiness, sadness, fear, lust, dreaming, doing math problems and writing novels - and our brains are not static.
So, I guess the answer to your question is very few people can bring off a novel of the future because it's just so damn hard to make it look like the future.
Dystopian novels help people process their fears about what the future might look like; further, they usually show that there is always hope, even in the bleakest future.
Novels are not about expressing yourself, they're about something beautiful, funny, clever and organic. Self-expression? Go and ring a bell in a yard if you want to express yourself.
But then in novels the most indifferent hero comes out right at last. Some god comes out of a theatrical cloud and leaves the poor devil ten thousand-a-year and a title.
I began my writing life as a poet, so poetry has always been fundamental. I evolved from poetry to journalism to stories to novels. But poetry was always there.
More often than not, real life is so rich, complex and unpredictable that it would seem completely implausible in the pages of a novel.
I started realising that the themes running through all of my novels were really haunting and obsessing me about my own life.
I could go off into the wilderness and write fantasy novels for the rest of my life and probably be happy; but I always want to challenge myself.
'Shantaram' is the second in the series of a quartet of novels that I have planned about my life but is the first to be written. The third book is a sequel to 'Shantaram,' the first a prequel.
I have resolved to pick one novel and just read it over and over again for the rest of my life, because I cannot remember anything anymore.
We have learned in recent years to translate almost all of political life in terms of conspiracy. And the spy novel, as never before, really, has come into its own.
What do you do in a novel? You take recognizable characters from your own life, and you fantasize about what they're really like.
To be true to life, a novel must have an ending that is inevitable given the specific personalities of the characters involved. The novelist must not impose an ending upon them.
Literature - novels, plays, and poems - can have an uncanny dual life, where they simultaneously represent something eternal and something historical, and this is often how they are taught in school.
