I think several generations of my family had novels in the drawer. You know the montage in 'The Royal Tenenbaums' where each character has produced some sort of minor work? It was like having a magician in the household.
I have assiduously avoided calling my books novels.
I don't trust novels with points, do you? If a novel is only about a point, the writer should just say it in as few words as possible so we can take it in and go back to watching 'The Bachelor' on television.
Every author really wants to have letters printed in the papers. Unable to make the grade, he drops down a rung of the ladder and writes novels.
People are much more complicated in real life, but my characters are as subtle and nuanced as I can make them. But if you say my characters are too black and white, you've missed the point. Villains are meant to be black-hearted in popular novels. If you say I have a grey-hearted villain, then I've failed.
For a long time, since story collections look almost precisely like novels, I presumed that they were meant to be enjoyed in the same way as novels.
If novels and stories are bulletins from the progressive states of ignorance a writer passes through over the years, observations and opinions about horses are all the more so, since horses are more mysterious than life and harder to understand.
As an artist, my wheelhouse is 19th-century literature. I want to write realist novels in a Victorian sense, and the writers I admire in that style tend to do omniscient narration.
I've written 16 children's books and five unpublished novels. Some of the latter were breathtakingly bad.
But at the same time, I have trouble keeping things out of books, which is why I don't write short stories because they turn into novels.
Historical novels are hard to do for the general public for commercial writers like myself.
So, in some ways, the political songs tend to be a bit more like reportage, whereas the love songs tend to be like novels, you can pick them up off the shelf and go into them any time.
The writer of stories or of novels settles on men and imitates them; he exhausts the possibilities of his characters.
I actually started trying to be a professional writer with novels, and I wrote two that exist and are around... kind of. But they never really went anyplace in particular. I still like them both. What it showed me was that you can spend years on a novel, and then it could just be, like, OK, you spent that time and that's that.
I think in general, novels by men tend to be taken more seriously than novels by women.
The 'Barnaby' books were always intended to be graphic novels.
Fantasy novels, I don't really gravitate to that part of the bookstore.
I did not have a chance to write novels until my youngest child started school fulltime.
I like to live in my own mind, regardless of everyone and everything, working out the intimate puzzles that are my stories and novels.
There's no lack of writers writing novels in America, about America. Therefore, it seems to me it would be wasteful for me to add to that huge number of people writing here when there are so few people writing about somewhere else.
I have tried very hard as a novelist to say, 'Novels are about individuals and especially larger than life individuals.'
Often I think the novels I read won't make very good movies - I better not say which I'm looking at for potential films! - but it's nice to have an excuse to just sit and read for a whole day.
In order to write novels for a living - it's not pathological, but I do think and worry and brood and fidget about stuff that I'm working on.
As a reader, I've always been interested in dystopian novels like 'Nineteen Eighty-four'.
I can't read novels while I'm writing a novel, because somebody's voice creeps in.
I think, above all, the characters in my novels feel universal to the readers.
There was a time in my life when I wasn't sure I'd ever write a short story again because I had started writing novels, and I am fundamentally a lazy person, and the fact is that a novel is a lazy person's form, really. That is, you can amble; you can digress.
I do have some theatrical background. I've written plays and seen plays and read plays. But I also read novels. One thing I don't read is screenplays.
'Great Expectations' was an important novel in my adolescence. It was very much one of those emblematic novels that made me wish I could write like that. It helped that my models as a writer were dead over a hundred years before I began to write.
I think that's because believable action is based on authenticity, and accuracy is very important to me. I always spend time researching my novels, exploring the customs and attitudes of the county I'm using for their setting.
I'm writing a movie about Mozart going to New York in the '60s. I've been reading so many novels.
I certainly think we're going to see more and more graphic novels and more illustrated novels.
I was convinced that the only thing I wanted to do ever - was write novels.
My early novels were very understated and English. Fourteen years ago, I met and married my American husband, and as I learned more about his background and culture, I became interested in using American voices.
Aphorisms are bad for novels. They stick in the reader's teeth.
I write novels because there is something I don't understand in reality.
