As a novelist, I like the contained drama and complexity of the courtroom, though I don't watch those shows on TV. I prefer the hospital shows because I wanted to be a doctor.
I believe that only poetry counts ... A great novelist is first of all a great poet.
The contemporary American novelist benefits in a way from being ignored. It makes you angrier and makes you want to go into all of those places where you shouldn't.
I think the hardest part of writing is revising. And by that I mean the following: A novelist has to create the piece of marble and then chip away to find the figure in it.
It is not the first duty of the novelist to provide blueprints for insurrection, or uplifting tales of successful resistance for the benefit of the opposition. The naming of what is there is what is important.
I'm a white, middle-class male who had a happy childhood in Ohio. The world does not need me to be a novelist.
If I want to write a movie, I'll write a screenplay, but if I have an idea for a book, it's something that I think can only be done novelistically.
I'm always determined that as a novelist I'm going to go out there and research my characters very thoroughly before I start writing.
San Francisco has long been a leader in the arts, nurturing generations of painters, sculptors, poets, novelists, playwrights, film-makers, and performing artists and innovators of every kind.
I am worrying about my country. I feel I have a responsibility as a novelist to do something.
A novelist who writes nothing for 10 years finds his reputation rising. Because I keep on producing books they say there must be something wrong with this fellow.
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.
With the marketing pressures driving the book world today, it's much easier to get the author of a memoir on a television show than a serious novelist.
I don't think I'm a natural novelist. Plot is definitely one of my weaker points. I've been working on it a long time, and it's not getting much better.
Yuri Orlov: After the Cold War, the AK-47 became Russia's biggest export. After that came vodka, caviar, and suicidal novelists.
The painter paints, the musician makes music, the novelist writes novels. But I believe that we all have some influence, not because of the fact that one is an artist, but because we are citizens.
Barton: W.P. Mayhew? The writer? W.P. Mayhew: Just Bill, please. Barton: [screaming] BILL! You're the finest novelist of our time.
I wish people would think of me as a musician who writes novels, instead of a novelist who writes music on the side.
I'm a novelist, a critic, an essayist - I tend to see politics as a subset of cultures rather than the other way around. It's a human enterprise, a tool or a technology revealing our collective inner self.
The artist deals in what cannot be said in words. The artist whose medium is fiction does this in words. The novelist says in words what cannot be said in words.
