Even though I got a late start, first publishing an essay when I was 50 years old, I've since written eight suspense novels.
I enjoy thinking myself into other times and places. I don't like some of the conventions of the 'historical novel', but I think there's a way of doing it that has a lot of merit.
Isn't post-modernism really one big cover-up for the failure of the French to write a truly interesting novel ever since a sports car ate ?
What makes literature interesting is that it does not survive its translation. The characters in a novel are made out of the sentences. That's what their substance is.
Another thing I learned is that novels, even those from apparently distant times and places, remain current and enlightening, and also comforting.
Novelists of a conservative or more purely aesthetic bent hold up better on the surface, but their novels go in and out of fashion according to relevance or irrelevance.
In effect I am not a novelist, but rather a failed essayist who started to write novels because he didn't know how to write essays.
I'm no lyrical stylist; you wouldn't pick me for a perfect sentence, and I certainly wouldn't describe my novels as intellectual.
I see no intrinsic reason why a doubly talented artist might not arise and create a comic-strip novel masterpiece.
Here was a fragment of Goddess myth that, through all its permutations, had somehow escaped being turned on its head. It was the perfect springboard for the sort of novel I wanted to write.
There's something really nice about writing something on Wednesday and watching it being performed live for a studio audience on Tuesday. You never really get that with novels.
I wrote the first draft of my first novel at Michigan, and then I wrote the first draft of 'Salvage the Bones' at Stanford. So I workshopped the entire thing.
When I was growing up, I always read horror books, while my sister read romance novels.
The impulse of the journalist is to be novel, yet to relate his curiosities to the urgencies of the moment; the philosopher seeks what he conceives to be true, regardless of the moment.
Our sense of self is a kind of construct. It is in some ways like a novel, and it's like a fabric of fictions that we patch together from memory.
I probably listen to Burn more than any of them, because it was so new me, so novel. To see my name on an actual record was such an incredible feeling.
It's no accident that my first novel was called Americana. This was a private declaration of independence, a statement of my intention to use the whole picture, the whole culture.
I've read every one of Donald Goines' books. So as soon as I heard there was an opportunity for one of his novels to be turned into a movie, I jumped at the opportunity.
Although a novel takes place in the larger world, there's always some drive in it that is entirely personal - even if you don't know it while you're doing it.
Let me tell you one thing about why writers write: had I known the answer to any of these questions I would never have needed to write a novel
The fundamental purpose of a novel like Count Julian is to achieve the unity of object and means of representation, the fusion of treason as scheme and treason as language.
