My novels about medieval Wales were set in unexplored terrain; my readers did not know what lay around every bend in the road.
I knew I wanted to write novels, but I could not finish what I started. The closer I got, the more ways I'd find to screw it up.
Rohinton Mistry's celebrated novel 'Such a Long Journey' was pulled off the syllabus of Mumbai University because local extremists objected to its content.
A novel, I think, is partly about the contemporary and partly about the eternal, and it's the balance of that that's difficult to achieve.
People who actually tell stories, meaning people who write novels and make feature films, don't see themselves as storytellers.
My first novel, 'Leaving Atlanta,' took at look at my hometown in the late 1970s, when the city was terrorized by a serial murderer that left at least 29 African-American children dead.
My spirit has been around far longer than my soul--I've lived several lifetimes already. And one this novel has been written, I will have lived several more.
I'm used to adapting my novels for feature film - it can be challenging to cut and compress three or four hundred pages into two hours of dramatic action.
Nothing beats novel writing because it's complete expression of you. You just control everything. Not even a movie director has that level of control.
I read anything that’s going to be interesting. But you don’t know what it is until you’ve read it. Somewhere in a book on the history of false teeth there’ll be the making of a novel.
I would only read the novels that people classify as 'beach books' if I were being held prisoner and the only alternative was the 'Book of Mormon.'
When I was young, about 18 or 19, I read all the Dostoyevsky novels, which made me want to go to St. Petersburg. So I went, and I was so inspired.
I'm writing a novel about two actresses who go to New York, because that's what I know about. One has lost touch with reality, disappears and is picked up by a man.
I also read modern novels - I have just had to read 60 as I am one of the judges for the Orange Fiction Prize.
Only thanks to blissful ignorance, and the inspiration of my grandparents' story, did I actually believe tackling a novel would be an easy task. I've since learned otherwise.
I try to write about a woman finding her self-respect, valuing herself, and liking herself again. But what one desperately wants now is to write a proper novel.
Some authors, when starting a novel, imagine a place first. Others, a character starts taking shape in their head. I start with a hook, a situation, a 'what if.'
The reason Saul Bellow doesn't talk to me anymore is because he knows his new novels are not worth reading.
Jane Austen is at the end of the line that begins with Samuel Richardson, which takes wonder and magic out of the novel, treats not the past but the present.
I almost always use first person voice in my novels. It has its limitations, but it gives a sense of immediacy that's hard to create with an anonymous, all-seeing narrator.
I'm not a lawyer, but I play one in my novel COPYRIGHT. I also play a serial rapist, a drug addict, a teenage boy and lesbian model.
