When I was working on a Victorian-era novel, to get in the mood, I read several historical novels set in approximately the same period and place, and really enjoyed the detective novels of John Dickson Carr.
My mom was a high school science teacher for decades. She just never made it feel like we had to choose between the arts and the sciences. We had bookshelves full of novels, and she also had Rachel Carson and Aldo Leopold and Carl Sagan.
I find the attempt to find things out, which scientists are possessed by, to be as human as breathing, or feeding, or sex. And so the science has to be in the novels as science and not just as metaphors.
Graham Greene's work must be included in any survey of top-rank spy novels, and 'Our Man in Havana' may be his best.
I always have a book that I use that somehow inspires my novels.
Fiction novels, that's my game.
I had tried writing novels for many years, and they always escaped me. For a long time, I thought, 'It's just not in me to write a novel. It's not something I'm able to do.' It seemed like everything I wrote naturally ended at the bottom of page three. A picture book, three pages; an essay, three pages.
In my career as a writer, I preferred to avoid current events: I wrote young adult novels and book reviews and lifestyle journalism about health and parenting and other such evergreens.
I work on my novels wherever I have a PC, and I have four or five places around the world where I do have a PC. These days you can just slip a little flash drive into your top pocket, fly for 12 hours, come to another place, plug it into a computer and you are away again.
I love doing the research for the novels. For me, the writing is hard work.
I write about the period 1933-42, and I read books written during those years: books by foreign correspondents of the time, histories of the time written contemporaneously or just afterwards, autobiographies and biographies of people who were there, present-day histories of the period, and novels written during those times.
I think there is often a 'what if' proposition that gets me thinking about all my novels.
I had begun to write novels because of a fierce, self-serving impulse in my own heart. I had not considered the potential in a book for felt communion, the bright largesse of intimately participating in the lives of other people.
Poetry and novels are lists of our devotions. We love the feel of making the marks as the feelings are rising and falling.
I'm really shy, man. I don't really talk much. I just read, sit in my room and just read graphic novels because I don't have many friends and many people that like to talk to me.
Now you mustn't think that I don't have any ideas for novels in my head. I've got ideas for ten novels in my head. But with every idea I have, I already foresee the wrong novels I would write, because I also have critical ideas in my head; I've got a full theory of the perfect novel, and that's what stumps me.
I try to write about things, places, events, and phenomena I know about personally. That helps make the novels more genuine.
I guess I would say that most of what I've learned about storytelling derives from novels and short stories. I cannot think of a novel or story, or a novelist or story writer, who thinks in terms of three-act structure.
I grew up on Jane Austen novels and was a massive literature fanatic when I was a kid - I read everything I could get my hands on.
I don't very often read novels.
When you get inside a literary novel you feel that the author, more often than not, just doesn't know enough about things. They haven't been around enough - novelists never go anywhere. Once I discovered true books about real things - books like 'How To Run a Company' - I stopped reading novels.
People who don't read seem to me mysterious. I don't know how they think or learn about other people. Novels are a very important part of our education.
There are nineteen Harry Bosch books, and someone told me if you add up the descriptions of Harry from all of them, it would come to less than three pages. He's very elliptically described over the two decades during which the novels occur. I did that by intention.
I'm a big fan of martial arts films, novels and radio programs.
Well, when you look at a lot of science fiction novels they're asking questions about power. There are questions about what it means to have power and what are the long-term consequences of power.
Teen problem novels? I can go through them like a box of chocolates. And there are fantasy books out now that need a lot more editing. Fantasy got to be so popular that people began to think 'We don't need to be as diligent with the razor blade,' but they do.
One of the things novels should do is shine a light on those parts of us that are common, the fibres that connect all of us. They should convey the sense that we're all connected, coming from the same tree, sharing common roots.
I'm a morning person because I learned to write my novels while still practicing law. I would get to the office at 6:30 a.m. and write until other people arrived, around 9. Now I still do that. I start at 6:30 or 7, and I'll write until 11, then take an hour off, then work until about 2 p.m. By then my brain has had enough.
Traditionally, people have been adapting novels and short stories forever. Now, they're doing it simultaneously, with an eye towards writing the movie before the novel has even come out or been finished. It's a function of this hyper-accelerated society we live in, where everyone is trying to short circuit the process.
At home, I tend to read print, and most of the time, that means recently released hardcover novels. I enjoy the feel of paper and board; I like turning pages, dog-earing my spot, jotting notes in the back.
I want to write novels, and I want to write and direct theater.
As a kid, I'd buy novels with these magnificent Chris Fosse covers which showed an enormous contraption hovering over a planet, and you'd always think 'Where's that going to come in?' And it never did! It was always slightly disappointing when the contents of a book never lived up to the cover.
I like dialogue in novels. I wanted to avoid laying history on with a trowel - appearing to be lecturing, as opposed to the characters lecturing their children or students. Dialogue can humanise the story and make it go down somewhat more smoothly.
I start with theory rather than people. I don't like novels which have no theoretical or philosophical underpinning. I hate the contemporary novel where people just sit and talk to each other about their relationships.
I'd say that the question whether love still exists plays the same role in my novels as the question of God's existence in Dostoevsky.
