I have a slightly contrarian streak as a writer, and one of the things I was interested in was how distilled could I make a life, and how I could cross what is kind of trivialized as a domestic novel with a novel of ideas, a philosophical novel.
I like to know the places I write about. I feel like it helps me ground the novel. My novels are 'realistic novels,' but they can also be fantastical, so it's nice to have a setting that grounds them a little bit.
Fantasy novels reveal “emergency escape routes” from reality. Romance novels dish out a banquet of Eye Candy. Otherworldly passion erupts when the two collide in an epic novel of unforgettable characters and dire circumstances.
When Tito was born, I was writing my fifth novel. That was how I saw my future: living in Venice and jumping from novel to novel. Tito's birth changed all that.
A novel rough draft is like bread dough; you need to beat the crap out of it for it to rise.
Rereading parts of your novel while writing is like doubling back at rerunning parts of a marathon midrace.
In summing up Lawrence's earlier novels and in anticipating the later, Sons and Lovers is of central importance to the whole Lawrence canon because it contains the psychological basis of much of the later doctrine.
When I write a novel, I want it to be completely different from a screenplay. I'm very conscious of the difference, and I want novels to work purely as novels. Otherwise I don't see how they'll survive - why don't we just all go to the movies or watc...
Every pain is a lesson.
What is a woman's greatest virtue? Patience.
One of my favorite graphic novels of all time is Grant Morrison's 'Earth-2.'
You know, I read graphic novels but not encyclopedically.
Life resembles a novel more often than novels resemble life.
I much prefer a plotted novel to a novel that is really conceptual.
When Don Quixote went out into the world, that world turned into a mystery before his eyes. That is the legacy of the first European novel to the entire subsequent history of the novel. The novel teaches us to comprehend the world as a question. Ther...
Don’t be offended if you encounter some good-natured ribbing; the idea of writing a novel in a month deserves to be laughed at.
Back in my 20s, when I wrote 'A Place of Greater Safety,' the French Revolution novel, I thought, 'I'll always have to write historical novels because I can't do plots.' But in the six years of writing that novel, I actually learned to write, to inve...
Why would somebody just read a novel when they can see it on TV or in the cinema? I really have to think of the things fiction can do that film can't and play to the strengths of the novel. With a novel, you can get right inside somebody's head.
The process of writing a novel is getting to know more about the novel until you know everything about it. And it's been described as a kind of dreamlike state where you're letting the novel make its own shape, and you're putting into it the pleasure...
There's no such thing as the contemporary novel. Before I seem the complete reactionary, let me add that I've happily joined in many discussions about 'the contemporary novel' where what that usually, unproblematically means is novels that have appea...
Writing a novel is not at all like riding a bike. Writing a novel is like having to redesign a bike, based on laws of physics that you don't understand, in a new universe. So having written one novel does nothing for you when you have to write the se...
