Many novels and modern publications are corrupters of morals or distorters of truth.
Novels are political because in them, we try to identify with people who are not like us. And, in that sense, I like the first-person singular because I have to imitate accurately the voice of someone who is not like me. The third-person singular gives me an authority over a character.
I read a lot of detective novels.
Mushy novels, pretty pictures, pretty sculpture, decorations on the wall, nice parallel lines - make me sick.
The light that radiates from the great novels time can never dim, for human existence is perpetually being forgotten by man and thus the novelists' discoveries, however old they may be, will never cease to astonish.
In high school, my English teacher Celeste McMenamin introduced me to the great novels and Shakespeare and taught me how to write. Essays, poetry, critical analysis. Writing is a skill that was painful then but a love of mine now.
All novels must be autobiographical because I am the only material that I know. All of the characters are me. But at the same time, a novel is never autobiographical even if it describes the life of the author. Literary writing is a completely different medium.
First, people don't read novels off screens, and they don't have a tendency to shell out real money for books when they don't retain anything physically for their money.
Great, big, serious novels always get awards. If it's a battle between a great, big, serious novel and a funny novel, the funny novel is doomed.
I've often described my book 'Anno Dracula' as 'literally, a vampire novel' - in that it battens on to other novels and sucks their lifeblood, transforming as well as feeding off them.
By stereotyping my work's audience as self-involved and prissy, women-only packaging also insults my readers, who could all testify that trussing up my novels as sweet, girly, and soft is like stuffing a Rottweiler in a dress.
I have to say that movies have as much impact on me as music. And that I learned as much about narrative from movies as I did from reading novels, how to arrange stories, how to juxtapose things.
Life resembles a novel more often than novels resemble life.
You amp things up and you speed things up, but technically, you can still be legally correct. This is the big beef I have with novels as well as television shows - it actually makes for a better show when you accommodate the truth.
Of the first seven novels I wrote, numbers four and five were published. Numbers one, two, three, six, and seven, have never seen the light of day... and rightly so.
Within the sphere of steampunk, there seems to be a rapidly growing subsphere of gadgetless 'neo-Victorian' novels, most of which attempt to recapture the romance of the era without all the sociopolitical ugliness.
I'm a fast writer, and crime novels are easy to do. It's much harder to write a 1,000 word article, where everything has to be 100 per cent correct.
When I start writing these novels, I go into them with a spirit of inquiry rather than to substantiate prejudices I had in the beginning. If you don't do that, you can't write good characters.
In everything I've written, the crime has always just been an occasion to write about other things. I don't have a picture of myself as writing crime novels. I like fairly strong narratives, but it's a way of getting a plot moving.
To be honest, I wasn't a sci-fi geek at all. But I do love a good sci-fi film, especially one that can really take you away. And I read some reality-bending novels growing up, like stuff by Vonngeut, so I already had one part my brain open to the unnatural and unusual, and it's generally fun to venture into that world and film in it.
Sometimes I ask myself if writing novels is even respectable.
People unacquainted with graphic novels, including journalists, tend to think of 'Watchmen' as a book by Alan Moore that happens to have some illustrations. And that does a disservice to the entire form.
At a certain point my novels set. They set just as hard as that jam jar. And then I know they are finished.
When I wrote The Onion Field, I realized that my first two novels were just practice.
I had been attempting novels since I was 14 but always ran out of steam. High hopes, poor craftsmanship.
I was 35, had always wanted to write novels, and thought that I had better do it while I was young enough.
I hadn't realized quite how intense the first few years of grad school would be. When you're being assigned 40 books a week... there's not much room for novels.
I have two ideas for novels at the moment, neither of them all that conventional, but I'm not ready to choose between them yet, let alone settle down to the process of writing.
I love novels, but I'm not a novelist. I'm just a dramatist, which means I write lines for actors. That's all I have ever wanted to do.
All my novels are about people who strive to heal and evolve.
I try to keep all my novels in print. Sometimes publishers don't agree with me as to their worth.
I would only read the novels that people classify as 'beach books' if I were being held prisoner and the only alternative was the 'Book of Mormon.'
'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.
I would like to champion diverse forms like graphic novels and works told in verse and diverse writers and illustrators and diverse authors as well.
But novels are never about what they are about; that is, there is always deeper, or more general, significance. The author may not be aware of this till she is pretty far along with it.
My first seven novels were contemporary spiritual novels, my next nine had strong elements of fantasy, and now I'm writing thrillers, more as a choice to spread my wings than anything. Writers, like good wine, should mature with age.