I think the novel form chose me. I was a writer before I became a criminal... my first instinct was to write.
I believe in plot, in development of character, in the effect of the passage of time, in a good story - better than something you might find in the newspaper. And I believe a novel should be as complicated and involved as you're capable of making it.
I get a lot of mail from boys in detention centers, including one from a center where they only had a few copies of my novel. They had a deal with each other that they'd read a couple of chapters and then slide it under the door to the next guy. I think that's very cool.
There's no reason you should write any novel quickly.
When I wrote my first book, 'The Tennis Party', my overriding concern was that I didn't write the autobiographical first novel. I was so, so determined not to write about a 24-year-old journalist. It was going to have male characters, and middle-aged people, so I could say, 'Look, I'm not just writing about my life, I'm a real author.'
'Paycheck,' I thought, was a really, really good idea. I never got an opportunity, unfortunately, to read the novel, but I loved the idea of how to deal with intellectual properties. I just don't know that we necessarily got to the heart of that particular idea. I think it became more of a chase movie than anything else.
I just finished a novel called 'Exult,' by Joe Quirk, last night. It's about hang gliding. I liked his first book, too, 'The Ultimate Rush.' I now know that I never, ever, ever want to go hang gliding, so that's good.
I'd always wanted to write a novel, but after attending film school, I'd spent five years knocking on Hollywood's door and had put that idea aside.
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.
HBO and I have a deal to at least try to make a television series from the Leonid McGill stories. We're going to start with the first novel, 'The Long Fall.'
Every once in a while I feel the tremendous force of the novel. But it does not stay with me.
I was one of seven, and we took a lot of road trips - long road trips. And this was before iPhones and iPads and DVD players in cars. I remember how novel it was when I got my own Walkman so I could listen to music.
We have no general conceptual thrust for the band, other than trying to make music that keeps our interest. When things are novel, they are probably things we have discovered by accident or investigation rather than by design.
I don't trust novels with points, do you? If a novel is only about a point, the writer should just say it in as few words as possible so we can take it in and go back to watching 'The Bachelor' on television.
As an actor, there is room for a certain amount of creativity, but you're always ultimately going to be saying somebody else's words. I don't think I'd have the stamina, skill or ability to write a novel, but I'd love to write short stories and poetry, because those are my two passions.
A novel's whole pattern is rarely apparent at the outset of writing, or even at the end; that is when the writer finds out what a novel is about, and the job becomes one of understanding and deepening or sharpening what is already written. That is finding the theme.
Everyone deserves to be the hero of a novel.
When I wrote my first serious novel, 'Interior', I was inspired by a 1978 book of Updike's, 'The Coup', which is set in Africa and will come as a delightful surprise to anyone who has only read his Americana.
Life in cities is not a spring but a river, or rather, a water main. It progresses like a novel, artificially.
And I don't want to begin something, I don't want to write that first sentence until all the important connections in the novel are known to me. As if the story has already taken place, and it's my responsibility to put it in the right order to tell it to you.
What I couldn't help noticing was that I learned more about the novel in a morning by trying to write a page of one than I'd learned in seven years or so of trying to write criticism.
I think that if the novel's task is to describe where we find ourselves and how we live now, the novelist must take a good, hard look at the most central facts of contemporary life - technology and science.
The true self seeks release, not constraint. It doesn't want to be corseted in a sonnet or made to learn a system of musical notations. It wants liberation, which is why very often it fastens on the novel, for the novel seems spacious, undefined, free.
We are material creatures who spend much of our lives on material pursuits (even building a cathedral or writing a novel requires stone and mortar or paper and ink).
I wrote the worst novel ever.
I got this idea of doing a really serious big work-it would be precisely like a novel, with a single difference: Every word of it would be true from beginning to end.
I actually started trying to be a professional writer with novels, and I wrote two that exist and are around... kind of. But they never really went anyplace in particular. I still like them both. What it showed me was that you can spend years on a novel, and then it could just be, like, OK, you spent that time and that's that.
The novel is a penetrating study of morals and ethics.
Normally, I have a lot of alpha readers on my books. These are people that, once I finish a novel, I let them look at it and give me a reader response.
Like many writers, I started by writing short stories. I needed to learn how to write and stories are the most practical way to do this, and less soul-destroying than working your way through a lengthy novel and then discovering it's rubbish.
I wrote a novel for my degree, and I'm very happy I didn't submit that to a publisher. I sympathize with my professors who had to read it.
It was only after five years in the army, when I was having to do a very boring job in a very boring place, that I thought: 'Why not try writing a novel?' partly out of youthful arrogance and partly because there had been a long line of writers in my mother's family.
I've come to think of Dunnett as the literary equivalent of the Velvet Underground; Not many people bought the books, but everyone who did wrote a novel.
I've been interested in terrorism from the very beginning. My first novel is about that, too, and I think one reason I've been so interested in terrorism is because I have a deep interest - one of my deepest interests - in image culture and how it works. And terrorism is an epiphenomenon of image culture.
Only in a novel are all things given full play.
I love the novel as a form, as an adventure of mind and soul. Really, I absolutely love writing them; they consume my days and nights - what can I say? But I am an avid film student, too: I watch a movie every night.
