For a novelist, the great thing about the Stone Age people is that we know virtually nothing about their beliefs - which means that I get to make it up! But it's still got to be plausible.
Historical fiction is actually good preparation for reading SF. Both the historical novelist and the science fiction writer are writing about worlds unlike our own.
I tried to reject everything I knew as a TV writer when I decided to be a novelist, and the books didn't work. Finally I realized I should go back to all the techniques I'd learned.
I'm not sure if you can strive your way into a career as a novelist. You have to write books; there are no short cuts.
When I started out as a novelist, I thought I was going to be a private-eye writer. That was my intent, and that's what I studied, I mean, scholarly.
I maintain that if you're a novelist and you go into an art museum, you'll come out a better novelist. And if you paint a picture for an hour you're a better actor at the end of it.
I'm becoming more of a novelist as I get older. The novel just seems the truer form. There's less artifice involved.
The world has changed, the CIA is having to change, and again, the challenge for someone like me as a spy novelist is to write realistically about where they're actually going.
The pull of history has been a strong theme in my life as a novelist.
To my ear, the term 'comic novelist' is as redundant and off-putting as the term 'literary novelist'.
Every novelist has a different purpose - and often several purposes which might even be contradictory.
For a novelist, no matter what, it's a complete work, even if it's not published. But if you write a screenplay, and it's not performed, then it's a sad and frustrating experience.
The artist deals in what cannot be said in words. The artist whose medium is fiction does this in words. The novelist says in words what cannot be said in words.
Former Dublin newsman Paul Lynch made his debut as a novelist a few years ago with a book called 'Red Sky in Morning,' set in mid-19th century County Donegal, where a rage-driven farmer has committed a murder with devastating results.
I always wanted to be a writer, and I did want to be a novelist. In college I took a couple of classes that taught me I would never be a novelist. I discovered I had no imagination. My short stories were always thinly veiled memoir.
As a novelist, where do you go to tap into memories, and impressions, and sensations? It's usually, in my experience, your early life, before you started thinking of yourself as a writer, because somehow those experiences are unadulterated.
More people thought I was strange because I was a teenage novelist, not because I was from Oklahoma. That's where I got the looks like I was from the zoo.
Writing is, by its nature, interior work. So being forced to be around people is a great gift for a novelist. You get to be reminded, daily, of how people think, how they speak, how they live; the things they worry about, the things they hope for, the things they fear.
If the novelist isn't surprised by where his book ends up, he or she probably hasn't written anything worth remembering.
I hated being a novelist when I was 20 - I had nothing to write about.
Even if there is endless documentation, it would be impossible to know what a man thought inside his own mind... This is where the novelist's creative imagination has to take over.
I wanted to be a novelist from a very early age - 11 or 12 - but I don't think I ever thought I would write historical fiction. I never thought I might write academic history because I simply wasn't good enough!
I've been wrestling with Kafka since I was an adolescent. I think he's a great aphorist, a great letter writer, a great diarist, a great short story writer, and a great novelist - I'd put novelist last.
I've been a novelist since 1995 and have had novels in and out of option, and watching that process just made me realize that I have to live by what I teach my students, because I teach screenwriting at Spellman.
I'm really lucky in that I can do lots of different things. It must be really hard to just be a poet or just be a novelist - a constant cycle of effort and exhaustion and recuperation.
And when I'd be reporting in Israel, Palestinians would say, the Jews they're not like us, and the Jews would say the same things about the Palestinians, they don't want what we want. And I never bought it as a reporter and I don't buy it as a novelist. I think, you know, the sound of somebody crying for their lost child sounds the same.
The fact is that in this day and age I don't think any novelist can assume that a book will get attention.
I try to approach the film medium as a novelist and the novel medium as a filmmaker on some level. It's that question: Do we think in pictures, or do we think in language? And the novelist believes one thing, and the filmmaker believes another thing - and I'm fascinated by that balance.
I think of myself now as a writer, although I wouldn't go as far as to say 'novelist' because that sounds like a Victorian person.
The great thing about being a novelist is that you organize your own day.
And I didn't grow up wanting to be a director. I grew up wanting to be a writer, so for me, that was always the goal - to be a novelist, not a screenwriter. And I think, again, if I didn't have the novels, maybe I'd be much more frustrated by not having directed yet.
Writing tends to be very deliberate. A novelist could probably run a military campaign with some success. They could certainly run a country.
I am not an academic who happens to have written a novel. I am a novelist who happens to be quite good academically.
Writing a novel, when it's all going well, it's wonderful. You're lost in the world, and you have a relationship with your own mind. Also, as a novelist, you don't have to yell at anyone. But being an executive producer of a TV show, all you have is people coming at you with questions, and you're making decisions, decisions, decisions.
My paternal grandfather was a failed novelist. He stacked boxes of rejected manuscripts in a closet.
I read John Irving's novel 'The World According To Garp' when I was about 14 or 15. It was the first grown-up book that I had read. It is the story of a young man who grows up to be a novelist. I finished it, and I wanted to write a book that made the reader feel the way I felt at the end of that, which was sort of both bereft and elated.