A novel is a big thing. It's difficult to hold the whole story in your mind, especially when you've finished a first draft and are still giddy from the flow of creative juices.
Does the novel have to deepen the psychology of its heroes? Certainly the modern novel does, but the ancient legends did not do the same. Oedipus' psychology was deduced by Aeschylus or Freud, but the character is simply there, fixed in a pure and terribly disquieting state.
'The New Jedi Order' was a pure publishing project: a single massive story - virtually one huge novel spread across multiple volumes - told by a succession of authors.
It wasn't until I set out to write a novel about marriage that I realized how little I knew about the institution.
I've always wondered why there isn't a great French novel about the German occupation. The nouveau roman authors weren't interested in telling that sort of thing.
I had the notion that I wanted to write the great dirty American novel, so I went to Roanoke College on the GI Bill.
I've always felt that life is a novel, and part of it is written for you, and part of it is written by you. It's up to you to write the ending, ultimately.
'War and Peace' holds a strange place in literary history, participating in the crowning of realism as a substantial and serious literary mode in America, even as the novel also contributed to the argument that historical fiction could be by nature dangerous, illegitimate, and inaccurate.
For me, 'Moby-Dick' is more than the greatest American novel ever written; it is a metaphysical survival manual - the best guidebook there is for a literate man or woman facing an impenetrable unknown: the future of civilization in this storm-tossed 21st century.
I'm not a twentieth-century novelist, I'm not modern, and certainly not postmodern. I follow the form of the nineteenth-century novel; that was the century that produced the models of the form. I'm old-fashioned, a storyteller. I'm not an analyst, and I'm not an intellectual.
I wrote a graphic novel called 'Soul Stealer' with big, beautiful, epic artwork by Chris Shy. It grew into a trilogy.
When I'm writing a novel, one of the things I do is get big poster boards. They're actually canvases that artists use. And I keep all the characters' names on them. If you write a big novel, there's a lot of characters.
Everyone thinks they're going to write one book of poems or one novel.
'Emma' is my favorite Jane Austen novel - one of my favorite novels period; a novel about intelligence outsmarting itself, about a complicated, nuanced, irresistible heroine who does everything wrong.
When I was a child, writing was the worst possible choice of a career in my family. My father had always identified himself as a writer to my mother when they met. When they met, he was writing this great novel, there was no doubt about it.
After the novel was published, I came to feel that I couldn't call myself Orthodox anymore. It's so patriarchal, anti-women, anti-gay. There was something about writing 'Disobedience'... it felt like I had put it all in the book. I had done my best by it, recorded what it meant for me. I felt I was done.
The novel is the highest form of human expression so far attained. Why? Because it is so incapable of the absolute.
A novel, in the end, is a container, a shape which you are trying to pour your story into.
Imagine a world in which no writer has written a literary novel in sixty years. Imagine a place where not a single person has read a book that is truly about the character at its center.
The hardest novel to write was Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant.
The atmosphere of orthodoxy is always damaging to prose, and above all it is completely ruinous to the novel, the most anarchical of all forms of literature.
I cringe when critics say I'm a master of the popular novel. What's an unpopular novel?
I love words because you can only live one life, but in a novel, you can live a thousand: you contain multitudes.
The novel is the first art form that is an honest-to-god commodity. That's what makes it different from both high art and folk art.
Living in an entirely different physical as well as biotic environment, such a population would have unique opportunities to enter new niches and to select novel adaptive pathways.
A novel takes place over time. It's a historical narrative, and it needs to have a series of peaks and valleys and the move through. You can't just start at the highest pitch and stay there, but you can in a lyric poem.
I'm obsessed with the Victorian novel. I can't help it. I feel like the novel then was so powerful and agile in ways I'm not sure it is now.
It costs so much to make films. With a novel, you can write the whole thing on a ream of paper from Staples for $4.
I wish I could spend six years writing one novel.
I've been writing since I was about thirteen but didn't start a book until 2007. I spent four years writing a sci-fi novel before I wrote 'The Bone Season' at nineteen.
Having the urge to write a novel, especially if you've yet to be published, is like having a medical condition impossible to mention in polite company - it's a relief simply to know there are fellow-sufferers out there.
I often think of the novel as a form that celebrates social groups, and the short story being a form that is capable of celebrating an individual or a sort of insular little pair of people.
'Bag of Bones' was a big, distorted yet wonderfully entertaining novel that rode high on the bestseller lists in 1998.
Publishing a novel was such a proud thing for me. When I was a kid, I used to say to my mum and dad, 'I'm going to write a book. You'll see.' So when I did ,and it was published, and people liked it, it was great.
The only obligation to which in advance we may hold a novel, without incurring the accusation of being arbitrary, is that it be interesting.
A novel must be exceptionally good to live as long as the average cat.
