'One Hundred Years of Solitude' is a masterpiece because it is an episodic novel that has a rigorous form - an unprecedented combination. From the very beginning we know the town of Macondo will endure only a century, so there is a limit to the length of the narrative.
It's only a drawback in the States, where most people seem to have no real interest in other countries and the notion of a novel which might offer insight into life in the UK doesn't seem to appeal very widely.
There's never a false note in a Berg novel.
In every novel, I write about something - a place, an experience, an emotion - with which I'm intimately familiar, but it's also crucial to me that I take on challenges. If write only inside my comfort zone, I'll suffocate.
A romance novel is more than just a story in which two people fall in love. It's a very specific form of genre fiction. Not every story with a horse and a ranch in it is a Western; not every story with a murder in it is a mystery; and not every book that includes a love story can be classified as a romance novel.
Like any good spy novel, the Cox Report alleges that Chinese spies penetrated four U.S. weapons research labs and stole important information on seven nuclear warhead designs.
I once tried to write a novel about revenge. It's the only book I didn't finish. I couldn't get into the mind of the person who was plotting vengeance.
Today I began the novel that I determined to be great.
I don't call myself an 'industrial designer,' because I'm other things. Industrial designers want to make novel things. Novelty is a concept of commerce, not an aesthetic concept.
To write a novel is to embark on a quest that is very romantic. People have visions, and the next step is to execute them. That's a very romantic project. Like Edvard Munch's strange dreamlike canvases where people are stylized, like 'The Scream.' Munch must have had that vision in a dream, he never saw it.
You can't believe anything that's written in an historical novel, and yet the author's job is always to create a believable world that readers can enter. It's especially so, I think, for writers of historical fiction.
One performs a very different act when reading a movie and when reading a novel. Your attention behaves differently.
I try to hurt myself, to sprain something, writing every novel and story, because I'm stretching for something new and difficult that I haven't done before.
The way this whole novel thing came together was, I sold them one bill of goods and then didn't communicate very well. I am like Captain Run-on Sentence.
It was my angry, Dickensian novel, I suppose. It was cathartic - I expended a lot of frustration on that one.
In a novel, I could submerge my ego in a character's and let his perceptions take over.
Your basic, well-made novel by Ian McEwan or Jonathan Franzen just bores me silly.
My family can always tell when I'm well into a novel because the meals get very crummy.
Lost Illusion is the undisclosed title of every novel.
I liked the idea of exposing the beams in collaborative novel. And there are many - especially in the crime world - there are many people working together: James Patterson and his stable of sub authors; and then there are like Ken Bruen and Reed Farrel Coleman and Jason Starr.
The 370-year-old antique shop Trifles and Folly is the heart of 'Deadly Curiosities,' my new urban fantasy novel from Solaris Books.
Had I not gone to Japan in 1986, had I stayed home and majored in English literature as I'd intended to do, I might indeed have become an investment banker, an outcome that perhaps would have proved a more severe blow to the health of the U.S. economy than to the history of the novel.
If I use the word 'khichdi' in my novel, I don't have to get into the trouble of explaining that it is a dish of rice and lentils. My Indian readers know it.
I naively thought I would quit television writing, move up to Seattle, my novel would come out, and then I'd have a novel writing career, and so I found myself really stuck in this very poisonous self-pitying state and felt like I'd never write again. And I blamed Seattle for that.
I suspect that authors who start their careers writing for an adult audience - and who eventually produce a young adult novel or two - are more common than authors who begin by writing for young adults and who then gravitate toward composing something for an adult audience.
A lot of journalists are talented enough to write a mystery novel, and I would say that most of the top-end mystery writers actually started out as reporters. But there is more to it than just the writing; there's a learning process, and most journalists aren't willing to do it.
For me, writing a novel goes on for years, and the solitude goes on, too. It tends to swallow me at times. I know it's a problem when my husband sends the dog in to retrieve me.
I abandoned my second novel completely. Writing 'Kavalier & Clay,' I had several moments of utter collapse. Same with 'The Yiddish Policemen's Union.'
A novel is a mirror carried along a main road.
Novel writing is far and away the most exhausting work I know.
If I'd had more time or been a better writer, I would have tried to put the same ideas and experiences into a novel. But I didn't so I slapped it up on the Web.
The theory of founder effects does not explain how novel features like plumage traits arise.
I had always wanted to include images in a novel, and with my first book, 'Telex From Cuba,' I made an elaborate website that is basically all images.
People often call 'If I Stay' my baby novel, and I have to correct them. It's not my first book. It's just the first one anybody paid attention to.
I know many older writers who were very successful and whose books are now out of print, so you have to go to antiquarian booksellers to buy their fifth or eighth novel or whatever it is.
Writing a novel is a huge adventure; when it's going well it's more fun than fun. When it stutters to a halt put it aside. Go for a swim, go for a walk, take a week off. Don't panic or be afraid; you and your characters are in it together. Trust them to come to your rescue.
