My advice to anyone adapting a novel is that once they've read it and learnt to understand it, then they must throw it away and never look at it again!
I have survived by representing these sufferings of mine in the form of the novel.
Turning one's novel into a movie script is rather like making a series of sketches for a painting that has long ago been finished and framed.
Perhaps where text slides toward ambiguity, film inclines to specificity. A novel contains as many versions of itself as it has readers, whereas a film's final cut vaporizes every other way it might have been made.
In the West, audiences think I am a stereotyped action star, or that I always play hitmen or killers. But in Hong Kong, I did a lot of comedy, many dramatic films, and most of all, romantic roles, lots of love stories. I was like a romance novel hero.
A novel that does not uncover a hitherto unknown segment of existence is immoral. Knowledge is the novel's only morality.
I've been associated with Macmillan for over 45 years. I'd like to thank them for their continued commitment to my backlist and I look forward to continuing to work with them as they publish my next novel, 'Vicious Circle' in 2013.
I was planning to stay in the Army all my life, but I ended up being posted to a training camp in Wales and was so bored there, I wrote a novel.
Late night is no different than making a film, really, except that it's faster, and if you do a crap one, you can do a better one tomorrow. Writing a novel and doing stand-up - that stuff is very similar.
Before my book, 'California,' came out, I had modest hopes for it. Or, let's put it this way - I had the same hopes that every literary fiction writer in America has: I wanted the novel to be well-received, critically. As for sales? I didn't want it to disappoint, but I didn't expect it to be a best-seller, either.
When I was 22 years old, I thought girls would like me if I wrote a novel. I spent so much time writing that I was thrown out of graduate school.
I wasted a lot of years working on my writing and very grandly saying, 'And now... My Novel!,' which would soon be reduced to a short story, then to a paragraph.
SOON was the first novel where I used a rough outline. Usually I have characters and an idea and write as a process of discovery. Like working without a net.
Any fool can write a novel but it takes real genius to sell it.
Sometime early in life, I developed the notion - one which I have never relinquished - that writing a novel is the very finest thing a person can do.
I had written a book. For various reasons, the publishing industry had decided that my book was going to be 'important.' The novel had taken me 12-and-a-half years to write, and after being with the book for so long, I had no real perspective on the merits or demerits of what I had written. I hoped it was good, but feared that it wasn't.
My first novel was turned down by about twenty publishers over a period of two and a half years. Because my name is Irish and would not be familiar to English editors, one of them said: 'If she writes anything else, do let us know.' Slowly, very slowly, the books began to sell and be noticed.
In my novel, 'First Blood,' Rambo died. In the films, he lives.
Each and every novel is a world outside the world - for a reader to visit, for comfort, consolation, escape, or challenge.
My first novel, 'The Lions of Lucerne,' just poured out of me. It was an amazing feeling of accomplishment. My biggest fear and therefore my biggest obstacle to becoming an author had been, 'What if I spend all that time and the book is no good?'
I much prefer a plotted novel to a novel that is really conceptual.
Screenwriting is a much more collaborative effort. When you write a novel, it's just you, with input from your editor.
The novel moves like all the arts. It's transforming itself all the time.
Stephen King consummately honors several traditions with his rare paperback original, 'Joyland.' He addresses the novel of carny life and sideshows, where the midway serves as microcosm, such as in those famous books by Ray Bradbury, Charles Finney and William Lindsay Gresham.
Not only may she unconsciously register a favorable impression with my associates and me, but she may also suggest something by her work that will lead to some new and novel feature in a forthcoming production.
You always try to do your own thing. One of the things I wanted to do was to write a book that combines some of the best traits of contemporary fantasy with some of the traits of the historical novel.
I wrote a novel about Israelis who live their own lives on the slope of a volcano. Near a volcano one still falls in love, one still gets jealous, one still wants a promotion, one still gossips.
I have never started a novel - I mean except the first, when I was starting a novel just to start a novel - I've never written one without rereading Victory. It opens up the possibilities of a novel. It makes it seem worth doing.
I always knew writing a novel was a great thing.
For me, when I start a novel, I only have a general sense of what I am going to do - usually three or four big scenes or something to which I can really respond emotionally.
I've read science fiction my whole life. I never really dreamed that I'd be a published science fiction writer myself, but a short story I started years ago sort of demanded to be turned into a novel.
I shall not be satisfied unless I produce something which shall for a few days supersede the last fashionable novel on the tables of young ladies.
Film is a medium of clear lines and broad strikes - which can be fantastic - but compared to the subtleties and nuances of a novel, it doesn't even get close.
I'd never really considered doing young-adult novels, but one of the things that a friend pointed out to me is that I've actually had a teenage character in almost every adult novel that I've written.
My view of an excellent novel was probably set in the golden age of fiction in the 19th century: narrative, character and voice are of equal importance.
When I start getting close to the end of a novel, something registers in the back of my mind for the next novel, so that I usually don't write, or take notes. And I certainly don't begin. I just allow things to percolate for a while.
