If someone had told me in high school that one day I'd write an historical novel, I would have rolled my eyes.
The novel avoids the sublime and seeks out the interesting.
Of course I planned to write the Great American Novel; that lasted about a week, at which point I decided I had nothing to say that could possibly qualify. So I wrote a romance instead.
When I put together a graphic novel, I don't think about literary prose. I think about storytelling.
I definitely want to act and I want to sing. If those two fall through, I want to become a writer, probably, like a songwriter for other people, or a novel writer. I write a lot, and I read a lot. I like reading fiction.
You want to suggest something new, but at the same time, resolve the drama of the action in the novel.
A screenplay is not a finished product; a novel is. A screenplay is a blueprint for something - for a building that will most likely never be built.
In the early Seventies, I started writing a little autobiographical novel about my childhood - I made it into a mystery story.
People in the know say 'The Giver' was the first young adult dystopian novel.
I can't read novels while I'm writing a novel, because somebody's voice creeps in.
Every novel presents a slice of life. A noir policier for example presents one slice, one that perhaps addresses social dysfunction or some sort of pathology, while mine present a slice that is more upbeat and affirmative.
There was a time in my life when I wasn't sure I'd ever write a short story again because I had started writing novels, and I am fundamentally a lazy person, and the fact is that a novel is a lazy person's form, really. That is, you can amble; you can digress.
I never conceived of not writing a novel. I believed - oh, God, I believed, it was an article of faith! - I was born to write a novel.
Writing a novel - unlike operating a piece of heavy machinery, say, or cooking a chicken - is not a skill that can be taught. There is no standard way of doing it, just as there is no means of telling, while you're doing it, whether you're doing it well or badly. And merely because you've done it well once doesn't mean you can do it well again.
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.
'Great Expectations' was an important novel in my adolescence. It was very much one of those emblematic novels that made me wish I could write like that. It helped that my models as a writer were dead over a hundred years before I began to write.
To read a novel requires a certain amount of concentration, focus, devotion to the reading. If you read a novel in more than two weeks, you don't read the novel, really.
This is now the way our culture prioritises. Look up 'Steppenwolf,' and you'll get the band before the novel. Look up Jesus Christ, and you'll get the musical. Look up Princess Link-a-din and you'll get LinkedIn, the business-oriented social network.
The most important basis of any novel is wanting to be someone else, and this means creating a character.
Many of my short stories (all unpublished) were horror, and the novel I'd just finished was horror, too.
A short story is the shortest distance between two points; a novel is the scenic route.
I started a second novel seven times and I had to throw them away.
Embrace's infant warmers are a novel solution. The product has been designed specifically for resource-constrained settings.
For almost every novel I've written, I've read the daily newspaper of the time almost as if it were my current subscription. For 'Two Moons,' which was set in 1877, I think I read just about every day of the 'Washington Evening Star' for that year. For 'Henry and Clara,' I read the 'Albany Evening Journal' of the time.
I belong to the middle class that grew up very influenced by the Catholic church. The people of the novel are from a more pagan and practical world in which the Christianity is just a veneer.
For a Jewish Puritan of the middle class, the novel is serious, the novel is work, the novel is conscientious application why, the novel is practically the retail business all over again.
A great novel is concerned primarily with the interior lives of its characters as they respond to the inconvenient narratives that fate imposes on them. Movie adaptations of these monumental fictions often fail because they become mere exercises in interior decoration.
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.
Restoration I did because I really loved e novel and I like Michael Hoffman, who directed it, but it wasn't a really challenging part for me. I'm not critical of the film: I just don't think I gave a very interesting performance.
I am a newspaper columnist and a professional screenwriter, but my real love is the novel for all the room it has for characters to come alive and breathe and face their challenges.
I was totally absorbed in the real world, the politics, the history, the news, and I just couldn't find my way into the fictional world... When I finally could return to writing the novel, it was in fits and starts.
I always wanted to write a book. Not a romance novel. Maybe a crime thriller. Something with action. Maybe that will happen some day.
I'm a very organised and rational and linear thinker, and you have to stop all that to write a novel.
I was pretty dead set against ever writing an academic novel. It's always been my view that there are already more than enough academic novels and that most of them aren't any good. Most of them are self-conscious and bitter, the work of people who want to settle grudges.
A fact is a simple statement that everyone believes. It is innocent, unless found guilty. A hypothesis is a novel suggestion that no one wants to believe. It is guilty, until found effective.
To make a love story, you need a couple of young people, but to reflect on the nature of love, you're better off with old ones. That is a fact of life and literature - and of the novel ever since it fell in love with love in the 18th century.
