Ever since the '70s, Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo were the godfathers of Scandinavian crime. They broke the crime novel in Scandinavia from the kiosks and into the serious bookstores.
In the biographical novel, there's only one person involved. I, the author, spend two to five years becoming the main character. I do that so by the time you get to the bottom of Page 2 or 3, you forget your name, where you live, your profession and the year it is. You become the main character of the book. You live the book.
The most difficult novel I have had to write in terms of just getting it done was The Vampire Lestat. It took a year to write.
Every journalist has a novel in him, which is an excellent place for it.
Nothing induces me to read a novel except when I have to make money by writing about it. I detest them.
I would recommend the short story form, which is a lot harder to write since you have to be so careful with words, until there is plenty of time to doodle through a novel.
My favorite records are, like, The Pretty Things' 'Parachute' and 'S.F. Sorrow' and The Mothers of Invention's 'We're Only in It for the Money' and The Kinks' 'Village Green Preservation Society' - these records that have a story - even if it's not a literal story - because of how they're sequenced and flow. It's like a novel with sound.
Well I think after leaving prison, and having written three diaries about life in prison, it became a sort of a new challenge to write another novel, to write a new novel.
A short story collection can be as exciting as a novel. It is a real complete experience, like when you listen to a real good recording, a Beatles record, and there are so many good songs.
Novel writing should never be confused with journalism. Unfortunately, in the case of Primary Colors, a fair number of journalists confused.
The stories have been told so often by those of us who supported President Reagan over the years that they seem mundane, almost like a fictional novel or a movie script.
In film you can use images exclusively and narrate a whole story very quickly, but you don't always so easily find the form in cinema to dig deeper into human thoughts and emotions. And in a novel you can much more easily express a character's inner thoughts and feelings.
Writing a novel is not merely going on a shopping expedition across the border to an unreal land: it is hours and years spent in the factories, the streets, the cathedrals of the imagination.
Perhaps, more importantly, I think that most human beings realise only a fraction of the true potential of their minds, so the spiritual or mystical, the things which remain mysterious or unexplained have always drawn me to include them in any scheme for a novel.
A novel is like a gland pill - it nips off the cream of my hysterics and gets them running on track in a book where they belong instead of rioting all over my person.
To me any given story has its appropriate form. There might be some story I get involved with that's begging to be a graphic novel, so that will have to be that way.
The film of tomorrow appears to me as even more personal than an individual and autobiographical novel, like a confession, or a diary.
Then about 1951 I began writing again, painfully, a novel I called in the beginning A Life Sentence on Earth, but which developed into The Tree of Man.
For me, the short story is the depth of a novel, the breadth of a poem, and, as you come to the last few paragraphs, the experience of surprise.
With 'Nostromo', Joseph Conrad said that he had wanted to write a novel about the degradation of an idea. That's what we wanted to show in the case of Dustin Hoffman's character, Bernstein.
The novel is an artifact, which is why antiquarians cling to it so fervently.
The novel succeeds on terms exclusive to literature. A good film succeeds on terms exclusive to the cinema. That's why so many bad novels can become good movies, like 'Jaws' or 'The Godfather.'
I enjoy research; in fact research is so engaging that it would be easy to go on for years, and never write the novel at all.
I think Henry Miller has had huge influence not because he wrote about sex, but because the memoir or the nonfiction novel has become such a monumental force in American publishing, if not in literature.
My first novel, 'You Must be Sisters,' was started in Pakistan. I've wrote several novels and a TV drama set or partly-set there.
In a democracy, you have to find a market niche, make sure a novel is 'interesting' and 'spectacular.' That may be the toughest censorship of all.
I think there's a joy to be had in taking readers where they just don't want to go. If you are writing a properly realist novel, then don't blink. Why not see something for what it is and render it truthfully? I find it a good way of going about writing - not to blink.
One of the ways my first novel failed was that I was too in love with my characters.
Here was a fragment of Goddess myth that, through all its permutations, had somehow escaped being turned on its head. It was the perfect springboard for the sort of novel I wanted to write.
It means that no matter what you write, be it a biography, an autobiography, a detective novel, or a conversation on the street, it all becomes fiction as soon as you write it down.
Narrative art, the novel, from Murasaki to Proust, has produced great works of poetry.
Writing a first novel was an arduous crash course. I learned so much in the six years it took me to write it, mostly technical things pertaining to craft.
Reading a book is like re-writing it for yourself. You bring to a novel, anything you read, all your experience of the world. You bring your history and you read it in your own terms.
'Where'd You Go, Bernadette' is an epistolary novel - one told in letters. I had no idea how much fun it would be, puzzling together the plot with letters and documents.
I took the first James Kelman novel, 'The Bus Conductor Hines', home to my dad. I thought, 'My dad will like this; it's written in Scots.' But my dad said: 'I can't read that.' He was reading James Bond and John le Carre. That was part of what attracted me to crime - the idea of getting a wide audience.
It's such a risk to write a novel that it's easy to become conservative - you're spending what would be, for me, a couple of years of my life on a single idea. Which is maybe one of the reasons I write stories - if it doesn't work, you've only lost a month.
