Characters develop as the book progresses, but any that start to bore me end up in the wastepaper basket. In real life, we may have to put up with tedious people, but not in novels.
My childhood growing up in that part of Glasgow always sounds like some kind of sub-Catherine Cookson novel of earthy working-class immigrant life, which to some extent it was, but it wasn't really as colourful that.
I love words because you can only live one life, but in a novel, you can live a thousand: you contain multitudes.
I was in a peacetime army. It was like something out of a Le Carre novel: studying the habits of your enemy. It was very exciting. It's interesting living life as a civilian, then on Friday night you're parachuting into a foreign country.
Writing a novel is like making love, but it's also like having a tooth pulled. Pleasure and pain. Sometimes it's like making love while having a tooth pulled.
I have some other novels I want to write. I have a lot of short stories - I love the short story.
I'm just interested in serialization in fiction. I'm fascinated by it. I love the 19th-century novels. I'm interested in ways to bring that back to fiction.
I love novels, but I'm not a novelist. I'm just a dramatist, which means I write lines for actors. That's all I have ever wanted to do.
A straight writer can write a gay novel and not worry about it, and a gay novelist can write about straight people.
Strangely enough, the first character in Fried Green Tomatoes was the cafe, and the town. I think a place can be as much a character in a novel as the people.
I write whenever it suits me. During a creative period I write every day; a novel should not be interrupted.
I've tried very hard and I've never found any resemblance between the people I know and the people in my novels.
No one has a name in 'The Road.' Like Cormac McCarthy's novel from which it's adapted, 'The Road' features characters such as the man, the boy, the wife, the old man and the veteran.
Like the roller coaster of life...novels aren't fun without ups and downs and even an occasional loop.
Divorce in a young-adult novel means what being orphaned meant in a fairy tale: vulnerability, danger, unwanted independence.
With the novels, I try to write a few pages a day - it doesn't sound much, but it can be difficult if I'm not sure where the story is going.
There is a brilliant novel in all of us. Some imagine it…others live it. Authors dwell in an auspicious life by having the ability to fuse the two.
To me, the ultimate crime in an adaptation is the crime of reverence. A novel is one form of media, a screenplay is another, and a movie is yet another. There's even reverence to a screenplay.
I think every first-person narrator in a novel should be compromised. I prefer that word to 'unreliable.'
When I was little, my grandma used to get romance novels, and she would get hundreds of these, and she'd read a dozen a month.
This is one of his most human and most amusing and witty novels. The characters are very Indian. I decided that I wanted to do a comedy, so this was just the right one.
