Here we have the best Novels Quotes from famous authors such as Ian Mcewan, Luanne Rice, Mary Pope Osborne, Mark Billingham, Peter Straub. Find the perfect quotation from our collection.
I think of novels in architectural terms. You have to enter at the gate, and this gate must be constructed in such a way that the reader has immediate confidence in the strength of the building.
The reason Saul Bellow doesn’t talk to me anymore is because he knows his new novels are not worth reading.
Novels are the means by which we can escape the moment we are imprisoned in, but at the same time, the roots of a novel are in the world in which it is written. We write, and we read, to understand the world we live in.
Novels demand a certain complexity of narrative and scope, so it’s necessary for the characters to change.
‘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.
After I had written more than a dozen adult genre novels, an editor I knew in New York asked me to write a mystery for young adults.
Seriously, you know – I love to write. I enjoy the process; I enjoy the different processes, because writing for film and television and graphic novels is all very different. So I’ve never had the feeling of, ‘Oh, you have to do this one thing.’
I want to write novels, and I want to write and direct theater.
I started writing morning pages just to keep my hand in, you know, just because I was a writer and I didn’t know what else to do but write. And then one day as I was writing, a character came sort of strolling in and I realized, Oh my God, I don’t have to be just a screenwriter. I can write novels.
People often ask if my books should be read in any particular order, but they’re all standalone novels, so picking up any one of them would be fine.
Romance novels have the power to bring love into the lives of readers. Through the characters, we get to fall in love every time we pick up a romance novel. What could be better than that?
And I used to write novels and little stories and compositions and I – but I put them away because I started acting when I was 17. So there wasn’t much time.
The L.A Trilogy is a series of three novels starring Ray, a robot detective, and his boss, a computer called Googol. Set in an alternative version of 1960s Los Angeles, each book will be more or less standalone but together will form an overarching story arc with ‘Brisk Money’ as the origin story.
My first five novels were written longhand. So were hosts of short stories.
Movies are about people; there’re not about ideas. It’s like great novels. Great novels are not about ideas. There’s never been a great novel about ideas.
I’m a feminist, but I think that romance has been taken away a bit for my generation. I think what people connect with in novels is this idea of an overpowering, encompassing love – and it being more important and special than anything and everything else.
I am a writer, which means I write stories, I write novels, and I would write poetry if I knew how to. I don’t want to limit myself.
‘The Mortal Instruments’ is based on a series of novels by Cassandra Clare; it has been a New York Times bestseller, so it is pretty popular.
I always thought ‘chick lit‘ meant third-person contemporary funny novels, dealing with issues of the day. I mean, it’s not the ideal term; when I’m asked to describe what I do, I say I write romantic comedies, cause that’s what I feel they are. But I’m quite pragmatic.
The way that I write novels in particular is I don’t usually outline; I just write. Part of the fun is discovering what’s happening in the story as I’m going along.
I also wanted to do something that I hadn’t really seen in almost any black novels, which was a complex love story in which both people were extremely intelligent and talented and understood a lot of things and were still at odds getting it together.
If I present a boring personal life to my readers, it’s going to be harder for them to think of my novels as thrilling.
Movies have to handle time very efficiently. They’re about stringing scenes together in the present. Novels aren’t necessarily about that.
All of my scripts are based on other people’s novels. Generally, I consider myself as one who writes for theatre. I do not see film work as a continuation of writing for theatre. It is more of an interruption of the writing process.
As for ‘Great Expectations‘, it is up there for me with the world’s greatest novels, not least as it vindicates plot as no other novel I can think of does, since what there is to find out is not coincidence or happenstance but the profoundest moral truth.
I’ve made seventeen or eighteen films now, only two of which have been original screenplays, all the others have been based on short stories or novels, and I find the long short story ideal for adaptation.
I was definitely more of a movie/cartoon guy than comics, but I really do like graphic novels – I don’t have the time to sit down and read Stephen King like I used to, so I find picking up ‘Saga‘ every now and then and just diving back into it is a great way to stay reading.
Horror and supernatural novels give you a lot of what you look for in a crime novel, just with a twist that was very fresh for me as a reader.
One of the things I really like about Victorian novels is the close anatomisation of character. People’s gestures and mannerisms and the quality of their thought is very closely identified and analysed.
In novels, and American novels in particular, it’s not just about redemption, it’s about forward movement and healing oneself. Americans are very big on getting better.
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.
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.
Novels attempt to render human experience; that’s really all they are. They are meant to convey empathy for the character.
Nobody has ever written as many enjoyable, fun-to-read crime novels as Agatha Christie. It’s all about the storytelling and the pleasure of the reader. She doesn’t want to be deep or highbrow.
I like reading novels because it provides insight into human behavior. I am really interested in feelings and think they are what define us as a species. When you really get it right in acting, it’s an act of empathy. You feel less distant from others, and that is really exciting.
I describe my works as books, but my publishers in Spain, in the United States, and elsewhere insist on calling them novels.
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.
In seventh grade, with some vague sense that I wanted to be a writer, I crouched in the junior high school library stacks to see where my novels would eventually be filed. It was right after someone named Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. So I grabbed a Vonnegut book, ‘Breakfast of Champions‘ and immediately fell in love.
My maternal grandmother – she was a compulsive reader. She had only been through five grades of elementary school, but she was a member of the municipal library, and she brought home two or three books a week for me. They could be dime novels or Balzac.
I feel like it’s hard to get into historical novels where you know what the story is far too well.
I almost always use first person voice in my novels. It has its limitations, but it gives a sense of immediacy that’s hard to create with an anonymous, all-seeing narrator.
Most people like a little sex in their novels.
I don’t write tracts, I write novels. I’m not a preacher, I’m a fiction writer.
Since my romance novels had all been thrillers as well, it wasn’t such a leap for me to move into the straight thriller genre. The most difficult part, I think, was being accepted as a thriller writer. Once you’ve written romance, unfortunately, critics will never stop calling you a ‘former romance author.’
While novels are fiction, mine are usually very close to my heart. Like my other books, ‘The Lemon Orchard‘ is inspired by something I care about. I care so deeply. The stories are my dreams, and I want to do a lot of research. Roberto is based on a real live friend of mine named Armando who worked in my garden.
At one point I intended to write precursor and sequel novels, about the establishment of the Web and its next evolution, but I am very unlikely to now; they would take place in a different universe.
I had novels to write, so I wrote them.
There is nothing that’s been in any of my novels that, in my view, hasn’t been either illuminating surroundings or defining a character or moving a plot.
As a kid I wanted to write science fiction, and I was never without a book. Later I really got into being a scientist and never thought I’d be writing novels.
I had a long period of writing what I think of as ‘save the world‘ novels. ‘Fledgling’ was a chance to play.
I love fiction and read novels constantly.
Even if I couldn’t get my early novels published, I could still write. I went into newspapers, where I got paid to write every day. If there’s a better school for would-be novelists, I don’t know what it is.
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.
There are 2,000 young-adult novels published a year, and hardly any of them ever break out.
I began my writing life as a poet, so poetry has always been fundamental. I evolved from poetry to journalism to stories to novels. But poetry was always there.
I’ve written something like 17 novels, which isn’t bad, I suppose, but my father wrote 120 books, my mother 40. In comparison, I’m lazy.
If you read the first page of one of my novels, I can guarantee that you will read the last one. This isn’t just social commentary. This is also about writing good page-turners. I want people to keep reading.
I don’t read novels, but my semiotics study influenced everything about the way I read and edit and write.
Yes, I’m happy with Alan Ball’s production of my novels.
Here’s the thing about romance novels: The moment when the hero and heroine discover that they’re perfect for each other is often the moment when it’s them against the world.
I wrote eight full-length adult novels in my twenties. None of them were published.
In the past, it was only in science fiction novels that you could read about ordinary people being able to go to space… But you laid the foundation for space tourism.
I’ve always felt that the comic strip medium stands equally beside all the other story telling mediums: novels, movies, stage plays, opera, you know, you name it.
I’ve written a detective series myself, set in an imaginary, and slightly futuristic, Chinese city. The novels have an extremely tenuous relationship with the real world, since the hero is the city’s Hell and ends up with a sidekick who is a demon.
Cinema isn’t just a good medium for translating graphic novels. It’s specifically a good medium for superheroes. On a fundamental, emotional level, superheroes, whether in print or on film, serve the same function for their audience as Golden Age movie stars did for theirs: they create glamour.
But I have always – ever since The Accidental Woman – written novels about individuals attempting to make choices in the context of situations over which they have no control.
People respect nonfiction but they read novels.
If you enjoy math and you write novels, it’s very rare that you’ll get a chance to put your math into a novel. I leapt at the chance.
The mystery form was very helpful for me as a beginning writer because mystery novels and suspense novels have a beginning, a middle and an end.
I’m writing a movie about Mozart going to New York in the ’60s. I’ve been reading so many novels.
I love how easy it is to run my business, Writing Workshops Los Angeles, with the help of email and my website. I love that I don’t have to use cuneiform, a quill, or a typewriter to write my novels – I love to write on my laptop!
Well, to be honest I think I’m a better short story writer than a novelist. Novels I find very hard, hours and hours, weeks and weeks, of conscious thought – whereas short stories slip out painlessly in a few days.
There are still some people out there who believe comic books are nothing more than, well, comic books. But the true cognoscenti know graphic novels are – at their best – an amazing blend of art literature and the theater of the mind.
There are people who say they want to write novels. They think, ‘I’ll learn my craft on the romance novel.’ If you don’t love the genre, it’s going to show, and it’s not going to be a good book.
Actually, the 14 novels were written over a period of just over 6 years.
The best novels are those that are important without being like medicine; they have something to say, are expansive and intelligent but never forget to be entertaining and to have character and emotion at their centre.
Back in my 20s, when I wrote ‘A Place of Greater Safety,’ the French Revolution novel, I thought, ‘I’ll always have to write historical novels because I can’t do plots.’ But in the six years of writing that novel, I actually learned to write, to invent things.
I majored in English in college, so I read the classic dystopian novels like ‘1984’ and ‘Brave New World.’
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.
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.
Sometimes people write novels and they just be so wordy and so self-absorbed.
I am suspicious of writers who say their work is original and influenced by nobody. If it is, it is probably uninteresting. The biggest source of novels is other novels.
We try to make our own BTS context. Maybe it’s risky to bring some inspiration from novels from so long ago, but I think it paid off more. It comes through like a gift box for our fans. That’s something you can’t find easily from American artists.
Most novels put out by small or corporate presses don’t really sell that well – usually a thousand copies or so. Working with a small press, you have to be willing to book reading tours, plan events, make contacts with other small press authors, and find new ways of getting word about your new work out there.
In a culture defined by shades of gray, I think the absolute black and white choices in dark young adult novels are incredibly satisfying for readers.
I’ve read every single fantasy novel there is. I mean, I would challenge a lot of people to read more fantasy novels than I have.
Another thing I learned is that novels, even those from apparently distant times and places, remain current and enlightening, and also comforting.
I write in the most classical French because this form is necessary for my novels: to translate the murky, floating, unsettling atmosphere I wanted them to have, I had to discipline it into the clearest, most traditional language possible.
Growing up devouring horror comics and novels, and being inspired to become a writer because of horror novels, movies, and comic books, I always knew I was going to write a horror novel.
I can’t inhabit my characters until I know what kind of work they do. This requires research because my jobs for the last decade have been author and professor, and I’d like to spare the world more author or professor novels.
I don’t separate my books into historical novels and the rest. To me, they’re all made-up worlds, and both kinds are borne out of curiosity, some investigation into the past.
I’m not embarrassed about the novels I wrote when I was younger, but I couldn’t write them today because of my religion.
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.
The important discovery I made very early is that my novels had to be written without any given plan or outline. I can’t do it in any other way. But then they are dependent on the sentences, my intuition, and, as I have experienced many times, the subconscious.
I am extremely interested in how people negotiate catastrophe, not because I’m morbidly interested in it but because I’m interested in the secret of resilience; that’s what I’m always exploring in the stories and the novels.
I was incredibly determined – I wrote short stories, I wrote the beginnings of novels. I wrote a little children‘s book and sent it to the editor-in-chief of the children’s division of Simon and Schuster and she asked me to write a little children’s book for a series she was doing.
One good reason for writing novels based on your life is that you have something to read in old age when you’ve forgotten what happened.
Actually my first eight books were historical novels, but they were never published.
When someone asks me to list the 10 best novels ever written, I always refuse to answer.
I take a lot from everywhere. I take from music, architecture, novels, and plays. Anywhere that hits you.
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.
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 obviously prefer writing novels but I take my journalism very seriously, and I enjoy doing it between novels. It gives me an opportunity to move in the outside world.
In ordinary detective novels you never see the consequences of what happens in a story in the next book. That you do in mine.
Why do I like to write short stories? Well, I certainly didn’t intend to. I was going to write a novel. And still! I still come up with ideas for novels. And I even start novels. But something happens to them. They break up. I look at what I really want to do with the material, and it never turns out to be a novel.
I just reached the point where plot-driven novels don’t hold my interest because I don’t care about the fate of characters anymore – whether Emily marries Tom or not, that kind of thing.
As a reader, I’ve always been interested in dystopian novels like ‘Nineteen Eighty-four’.
The great thing about novels is that you can be as unshy as you want to be. I’m very polite in person. I don’t want to talk about startling or upsetting things with people.
Of John Le Carre’s books, I’ve only read ‘The Spy Who Came In From The Cold,’ and I haven’t read anything by Graham Greene, but I’ve heard a great deal about how ‘Your Republic Is Calling You’ reminded English readers of those two writers. I don’t really have any particular interest in Cold War spy novels.
Dystopian novels help people process their fears about what the future might look like; further, they usually show that there is always hope, even in the bleakest future.
So many Indian novels, quite unfairly, do not get the prominence they should because they have been written in a language other than English.
You know, people call mystery novels or thrillers ‘puzzles.’ I never understood that, because when I buy a puzzle, I already know what it is. It’s on the box. And even if I don’t, if it’s a 5,000-piece puzzle of the ‘Mona Lisa’, it’s not like I put the last piece in and go, ‘I had no idea it’s the ‘Mona Lisa’!’
I have a lot of novels that I haven’t finished. I usually get 150 pages in and I realize it’s not going anywhere. I don’t publish everything I write. I must have six unfinished novels at least.
Great novels have great characterization no matter what. But multiple points of view let me examine characters from entirely different perspectives, allowing me to learn more about everyone in the process.
I had ‘Push’ and ‘The Paperboy’ next to my bed for many years. Those are some of the great, great novels.
My first published novel, ‘American Rust,’ took three and a half years of full-time work to write. But I wrote two apprentice novels before that.
I read novels for entertainment rather than for edification, so I tend not to read the sort of novels that are said to illuminate the human condition.
After I’d been in college for a couple years I’d read Shakespeare and Frost and Chaucer and the poets of the Harlem Renaissance. I’d come to appreciate how gorgeous the English language could be. But most fantasy novels didn’t seem to make the effort.
Time spent researching varies from book to book. Some novels require months, even years of research, others very little. I try to do most of my research before I begin but inevitably questions emerge during the writing.
I’ve written 16 children’s books and five unpublished novels. Some of the latter were breathtakingly bad.
Novels are longer than life.
The novels that have fascinated me most are the ones that have reached me less through the channels of the intellect or reason than bewitched me.
In the first year, 1988, I wrote and sold 3 novels.
In many respects I have gone out of my way to avoid the usual approach adopted in crime novels. I have used some techniques that are normally outlawed – the presentation of Mikael Blomkvist, for instance, is based exclusively on the personal case study made by Lisbeth Salander.
I used to think that I could be successful if I pretended to be a 23-year-old black woman. I wanted to find a young black woman who would be willing to go in on this with me. I would write her novels, and then she would do the touring. I always thought I was too old and the wrong color.
Literature – novels, plays, and poems – can have an uncanny dual life, where they simultaneously represent something eternal and something historical, and this is often how they are taught in school.
I write what I call ‘novels of consolation‘ for people who are bright and sophisticated.
I’m very critical of crime novels that use gratuitous violence to shock readers when it isn’t necessary. If that’s all you have to offer as a writer, perhaps you’re in the wrong job.
When I begin writing, I have no idea what my novels are ultimately going to be about. I don’t have a plot. I never consider a theme. I don’t make notes or outlines.
By reading a lot of novels in a variety of genres, and asking questions, it’s possible to learn how things are done – the mechanics of writing, so to speak – and which genres and authors excel in various areas.
I did not have a chance to write novels until my youngest child started school fulltime.
I save the best of myself for novels, and I believe it shows.
I wrote one terrible manuscript after another for a decade and I guess they gradually got a little less terrible. But there were many, many unpublished short stories, abandoned screenplays and novels… a Library of Congress worth of awful literature.
Dystopian novels, such as Orwell’s ‘Nineteen Eighty-Four,’ often tend to site their despotised or deformed civilisations in urban environments.
We’re all just animals. That’s all we are, and everything else is just an elaborate justification of our instincts. That’s where music comes from. And romantic poetry. And bad novels.
I am sometimes asked to name my favourite books. The list changes, depending on my mood, the year, tricks played by memory. I might mention novels by Nabokov and Calvino and Tolkien on one occasion, by Fitzgerald and Baldwin and E.B. White on another. Camus often features, as do Tolstoy, Borges, Morrison and Manto.
Violence is inevitable in crime novels, but there are many different ways to tell a story. I use my characters’ reactions to illustrate the worst moments rather than let readers witness them at first hand.
I spent many years of my life as an economist and demographer. I was finally distracted by writing my novels and poetry. I’m enormously happy that was the case. I feel that with writing I have found my metier.
All of my books, which are supposedly, I mean they’re called YA novels, my hope is that adults would find no reason not to read them if they read them.
I’m very bad at violence in real life. I can’t stand it. And I’m so fed up with crime novels that have too much violence. I can’t really do it. It’s unnecessary.
The novel that’s contemporary in the sense of being wholly ‘of now’ is an impossibility, if only because novels may take years to write, so the ‘now’ with which they begin will be defunct by the time they’re finished.
When I was in my early 20s, my dream was to write mystery novels. I wanted to do what my favourite crime writer, Ross Macdonald, did – crank out a book a year. The only problem – and it was a considerable one – was that I stank.
Having written for film and television, I had little interest in turning ‘The Good Father‘ into a Hollywood thriller. I was writing a novel, and novels demand that the writer goes deeper, both emotionally and thematically.
I don’t like novels that tie everything up in a plot-y way. I always think that’s not really true of life, particularly of people in power.
I do believe that we baby-boomers are reinventing ageing as we enter it. We’re living longer and expecting more from life; the success of ‘The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel,’ and other films and novels about finding love late in life, have shown that if we’re up for it, there are adventures awaiting us.
I like to believe my suspense novels marry the strong characters from my romance writing past, with the twisty, clever plots of my mystery writing present.
I watch a lot of teen TV and read a lot of YA novels. I also talk to teens whenever I can. There are cultural differences between when I was a teen and now, but emotions – anger, angst, love – are the same.
I envy those writers who outline their novels, who know where they’re going. But I find writing is a process of discovery.
I’ve read probably 25 or 30 books by Balzac, all of Tolstoy – the novels and letters – and all of Dickens. I learned my craft from these guys.
Critics are not creators. They rarely write great novels, invent new technologies, or come up with a great business idea.
I don’t know if foreigners will take to my novels or not. It may be that my books appeal only to a particular gender or age group rather than convey a more universal appeal.
The most distinguishing element of my novels is that I try as hard as I can – within the context of a popular commercial thriller – to make them feel authentic. Drawing on real locations and real events is part of that authenticity.
I wonder if novels work for women because they give us a safe place to talk about our ish.
As an adolescent I wrote comic books, because I read lots of them, and fantasy novels set in Malaysia and Central Africa.
My father has always been the heart of my Penn Cage novels.
My high school did not offer courses in philosophy, so the books that initially stimulated philosophical reflection in me were novels by Charles Dickens, Henry James, and Fyodor Dostoyevsky.
The truly great books are always novels: ‘Anna Karenina,’ ‘The Brothers Karamazov,’ ‘The Magic Mountain.’ Just as with ‘Shahnameh,’ I browse these books from time to time to remember how a great book works on us or to teach my students at Columbia University.
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.
I sometimes think it ironic for an ex-seaman, longshoreman, truck driver, policeman, bus driver, etc… to find success writing children’s novels.
I didn’t get anything published until I was thirty-three, and yet I’d written five novels and six or seven plays. The plays, I should point out, were dreadful.
I really do believe some people are naturally novelists and some people are short story writers. For me, when I was in middle school or high school, I started with novels.
I write novels and other things.
I love research. Sometimes I think writing novels is just an excuse to allow myself this leisurely time of getting to know a period and reading its books and watching its films. I see it as a real treat.
At a certain point my novels set. They set just as hard as that jam jar. And then I know they are finished.
A Scanner Darkly’ is one of Dick’s bleakest novels, and almost certainly his saddest.
If you came from Mars and tried to analyse British or American society through novels, you’d think our society was preponderantly full of middle-aged, slightly alcoholic, middle-class, intellectual men, most of whom are divorced from their families and have nothing to do with children.
Novels are one of the few remaining areas of narrative storytelling where one person does almost all of the creative heavy lifting.
My friend Josh Glenn compiles terrific lists of genre novels from the mid-20th century. His latest is a list of the ten best adventure novels of 1966. Josh also includes the cover art of early editions of the books, which are always much better than the art on newer editions. I want to read every book in this list!
Read with care, George Orwell’s diaries, from the years 1931 to 1949, can greatly enrich our understanding of how Orwell transmuted the raw material of everyday experience into some of his best-known novels and polemics.
As far as I am concerned, I write novels, and other people can do the labelling.
If I had killed Crow off I can think of least six novels I would never have written, 400,000 words’ worth of very necessary experience.
I do seem to have a lot of family secrets in my novels. I guess I’m one of those writers who is often writing about the same sort of themes, but taking different angles on them.
No one will ever know how many novels, poems, analyses, confessions, sufferings and joys have been piled up on this continent called Love, without it ever having turned out to be totally investigated.
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.
I feel just fine about ignoring or bypassing the rights of people I have known and loved to be rendered faithfully, or to be left in peace, and out of novels.
In my contemporary stories, I write about today’s quilters, inventive techniques they use, and how technology has influenced their art. Novels set in the past let me have fun researching patterns that were popular and fabrics and tools available to quilters through history.
The thing about the ‘Melrose’ novels is that I have to feel they’re impossible when I set out.
As new technology emerges as the greatest challenge to novels since the advent of film, it may be that the fragmentation of storytelling into installments key to Dickens’s era will be recreated in some way.
Fiction novels, that’s my game.
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 hope people will like my novels after I’m dead. And I hope my children think about me in good ways, by and large.
Novels are such mysterious and amorphous and tender things.
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.
It’s with bad sentiments that one makes good novels.
I think of my books now as suspense novels, usually with a love story incorporated. They’re absolutely a lot harder to write than romances. They take more plotting and real character development.
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.
I think I belong to America’s last generation of novelists. Novelists will come one by one from now on, not in seeming families, and will perhaps write only one or two novels, and let it go at that.
I read all of Ayn Rand’s novels when I was 17.
Three of my novels and a good number of my short stories are told from the point of view of men. I was brought up in a house of women.
Asking the author of historical novels to teach you about history is like expecting the composer of a melody to provide answers about radio transmission.
I like Jo Nesbo and Hakan Nesser. There are so many good books in the world. I don’t want to spend time reading bad crime novels.
There are two different forms of storytelling: Novels tend to come from the inside of a character, and movies tend to look at them from the outside in relation to others in their world.
I think a writer’s first job is to entertain, even in novels: to tell a compelling story that pulls the reader along toward an end. At the same time, the best stories are character-driven.
I read a lot of literary theory when I was in graduate school, especially about novels, and the best book I ever read about endings was Peter Brooks‘ ‘Reading for the Plot. ‘
People who actually tell stories, meaning people who write novels and make feature films, don’t see themselves as storytellers.
Sometimes the fantasy writers set their novels in an ancient Earth, sometimes a parallel Earth, or, quite often, they offered no explanation at all as to the temporal and geographic location.
Novels give you the opportunity to create a whole world. Because you create people, you make them talk… You decide who they are, whether they live or die. It’s the closest thing to feeling like a god that you can come to.
I do my best to build a strong factual foundation for each of my novels and rely upon my author’s notes to keep my conscience clear.
Post-apocalyptic novels tell you that in the future there is some great war. I would tell you that most cops say that it’s going on right now.
I think ever since I started to read, there have been favorite novels for different stages of my life. And one is never bumped out of place to yield to another. Instead, I just add to my favorite shelves.
Continuous present is all we have, and stream of consciousness – which in a novel is arguably just as artificial as the stilted dialogue that you get in most conventional novels. They’re all stratagems to try to get closer to the texture of lived life.
I’m looking forward to writing more novels for young adults.
I’ve been fortunate in that I never actually read any Jane Austen until I was thirty, thus sparing myself several decades of the unhappiness of having no new Jane Austen novels to read.
I’m probably only going to make 10 movies, so I’m already planning on what I’m going to do after that. That’s why I’m counting them. I have two more left. I want to stop at a certain point. What I want to do, basically, is I want to write novels, and I want to write theatre, and I want to direct theatre.
It’s a luxury to be able to tell a long form story. I love novels, and I love to have a long relationship with characters.
The beauty of cinema is that it can do some things that novels just can’t.
I have read a number of books, starting with novels, that I particularly liked.
I didn’t know anything about Opus Die except from pop culture, like Dan Brown novels, which I knew wasn’t really knowing anything about Opus Die.
Perhaps, all writers walk such a line. In general – as we all do in our dreams – I believe I put something of myself into all the characters in my novels, male as well as female.
There are so many YA novels being made because there is so much young talent that can bring it to life. J-Law was one of the first females to do it with ‘The Hunger Games,’ and it’s been going on for a while now. With J-Law, it was like, ‘Hey, I’m Katniss,’ and then, ‘Hey, I just won an Oscar!’
The biggest threat to a better life is the desire to keep the future under control – to make the world predictable by reining in creativity and enterprise. Progress as a neat blueprint, with no deviations and no surprise, may work in children’s cartoons or utopian novels. But it’s just a fantasy.
I get a lot of moral guidance from reading novels, so I guess I expect my novels to offer some moral guidance, but they’re not blueprints for action, ever.
I wasn’t that into crime novels at all, but a friend introduced me to the work of Jim Thompson – I loved all his books.
I don’t see novels ending with any real sense of closure.
While I’ve written in the POV (point of view) of adolescent characters before… I never have had to create novels in which those characters not only drive the plot, but also are instrumental in resolving whatever issue the plot deals with.
I’ve done a lot of books with Asian antecedents to them – some of my fantasy novels have been that way, and certainly in the ‘Battletech’ universe, there’s a lot of Asian culture in that.
Coming out of university, one of my obsessions was that in the novels I was reading, they seemed to be portraying a world that had a social fabric. People knew each other in ‘War and Peace.’ They went to all the same balls. These were societies with tightly wound, woven, social textures.
When novels deal in abstractions, they generally go off the rails.
Even in horror novels where you know most characters aren’t going to make it to the end, it’s crucial to have fully fleshed-out characters. If you don’t do that, the reader doesn’t care what happens to them.
I plan to live to be 98, so I’ll be the guy at Dundas and Yonge flogging a box of mouldy novels.
I’m an avid reader. Novels, non-fiction, comics, it doesn’t matter. Best way in the world to feed your head.
I have some other novels I want to write. I have a lot of short stories – I love the short story.
I read mostly fiction, a lot of 19th-century novels.
Well, the medium of film is so different than a book that just by bringing it into visual storytelling is to change it up. I think in a book, in any book, you can have a reactive character. Some of the great novels of all time have had that, but in a film you can’t do that.
Reviewers have called my books ‘novels in verse.’ I think of them as written in prose, but I do use stanzas. Stanza means ‘room‘ in Latin, and I wanted there to be ‘room’ – breathing opportunities to receive thoughts and have time to come out of them before starting again at the left margin.
I have been a film buff all my life and believe that the finest cinema is fully the equal of the best novels.
Well, I think in my first two novels, both the characters are pretty neurotic, which I would say that I am.
Trollope wrote so many novels and other works that they tend to crowd each other out.
After closely examining my conscience, I venture to state that in my historical novels I intended the content to be just as modern and up-to-date as in the contemporary ones.
I wrote three novels in six months, with a clarity of focus and attention to detail that I had never before experienced. This type of sublime creative energy is characteristic of the elevated and productive mood state known as hypomania.
All the old school Young Adult novels inspired me. I grew up reading R.L. Stine, Christopher Pike, Richie Cusick, and so on. I loved how you never really knew who the ‘bad guys‘ were in their works, and I wanted to capture that feeling with ‘Don’t Look Back.’
I read a lot of the ‘Pern books’ growing up – basically up through ‘All the Weyrs of Pern,’ maybe a couple after that. As far as formative dragon influences are concerned, she’s probably one of the top ones; I know I read other fantasy novels that had them, but none particularly stick in mind.
I love novels where not much ‘happens’ but where the interest is in the ideas and analyses of characters.
I’m not a big crime reader, but I’m reading Michael Connelly’s ‘The Reversal.’ I’m going back to his novels. I’m also reading Keith Richards’ ‘Life.’ I’m always fascinated by the transition from the innocent late ’60s and early ’70s and the youth culture becoming an industry.
All great novels, all true novels, are bisexual.
Oh yeah, I grew up with comics. You know, I always like to describe myself as a ‘narrative junkie.’ I love novels, I love comics, movies, TV. If it’s a good story, I’m hooked.
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.
A lot of period pieces we see are adaptations of novels – we always know the story.
I think there is often a ‘what if‘ proposition that gets me thinking about all my novels.
I write the kinds of novels I like to read, where the setting is rendered with love and care.
Characters are the key to a good book. It took me several novels to comprehend that.
‘The Golden Compass’ became a bad experience because the studio didn’t have faith in the strength of the ideas of the novel, which is ironic because it’s one of the greatest fantasy novels ever written, if not the greatest, and they took the religion out of it and tried to turn it into a popcorn movie.
I’m used to adapting my novels for feature film – it can be challenging to cut and compress three or four hundred pages into two hours of dramatic action.
One of our fundamental human needs is finding our partner that we hope we will stay with for the rest of our lives. You often find the same search in other genres. The mystery novel has a romance subplot. Literary novels often focus on that relationship but do not often end well.
I don’t know who said that novelists read the novels of others only to figure out how they are written. I believe it’s true. We aren’t satisfied with the secrets exposed on the surface of the page: we turn the book around to find the seams.
With the crime novels, it’s delightful to have protagonists I can revisit in book after book. It’s like having a fictitious family.
All novels are about crime. You’d be hard pressed to find any novel that does not have an element of crime. I don’t see myself as a crime novelist, but there are crimes in my books. That’s the nature of storytelling, if you want to reflect the real world.
Sometimes I ask myself if writing novels is even respectable.
I am trying to write novels for properly clever people, but I also want them to be proper novels that also stick in a person’s mind and have an atmosphere about them.
I give novels as gifts, and there is nothing I like to receive more as a gift.
Writing ‘Book 1: The Maze of Bones‘ didn’t feel much different than writing one of my other novels, but I thought it was very innovative to offer the website and trading card components as well for those readers who wanted to go more in depth with the Cahill experience.
White people use their literature to maintain culture. That’s why you find references to Milton and Spencer and Shakespeare and Dostoyevsky in contemporary novels.
I never even had the time to read novels.
War has always been a part of science fiction. Even before the birth of SF as a standalone genre in 1926, speculative novels such as ‘The Battle of Dorking’ from 1871 showed how SF’s trademark ‘what if’ scenarios could easily encompass warfare.
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.
I started out when I was 29 – too young to write novels. I was broke. I was on unemployment insurance. I was supposed to be writing a Ph.D. dissertation, so I had a typewriter and a lot of paper.
I have written every one of my novels to convince somebody of something.
History is present in all my novels. And whether I am directly talking about the sociological moment or just immersing my character in the environment, I am very aware of it.
There are some individuals who look at graphic novels as ‘canon,’ and they cannot change in any way, shape or form, and that’s what makes them in some ways good fans.
Even the best novels have their share of stinker lines.
In 25 years of writing novels, I’ve never had anything that felt like writer’s block.
My gift, if that’s not too grandiose a term, is one for describing novels, biographies, and works of history in such a way that people want to read them.
What I loved about romances was the character, and I think I still bring that to my novels. What romance taught me was that the ‘who’ will always matter more than the ‘what.’ It’s fun to come up with plots, but I want to make sure the reader cares about who it’s happening to.
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.
I would have to say the novel ‘War and Peace’ influenced me more than any other book. This greatest of novels demonstrated to me the enormous power of literature and fired me up with a desire to become a writer, to participate in what I considered then to be the greatest of all endeavors.
I like the idea of making big budget films with a heart. I like graphic novels more than comic books.
My first attraction to writing novels was the plot, that almost extinct animal. Those novels I read which made me want to be a novelist were long, always plotted, novels – not just Victorian novels, but also those of my New England ancestors: Herman Melville and Nathaniel Hawthorne.
I have always loved and avidly read the novels of Jack London, Jules Verne and Ernest Hemingway. The characters depicted in their books, who are brave and resourceful people embarking on exciting adventures, definitely shaped my inner self and nourished my love for the outdoors.
‘Pastoralia’ by George Saunders is one of my favorite novels.
You want to make entertainment sometimes, and sometimes you want to make art, because I think the way we understand ourselves as human beings is through art, and the way we process emotions – I know I do – is through recognizing experiences on screen or in novels or in paintings.
‘Rainwater’ was particularly special because it was a complete departure from the suspense novels. It’s set in the Great Depression and based on an incident that occurred when my dad was a boy.
I want a career writing these novels that I can be proud of. And then I want one as a screenwriter.
Far more women read fiction than men, and because of this, novels have become marginalised as serious texts.
I continued writing the bad plays which fortunately nobody would produce, just as no one did me the unkindness of publishing my early novels.
I’m very interested in writing – it just takes so much discipline, whether it’s short stories or novels.
I wrote about four novels before I wrote a word of journalism.
The readership of Victorian novels, when they were published, was much less diverse. People were probably white, and had enough money to be literate. Very often, there are phrases in Italian, German and French that are left untranslated.
I actually find novels that are determined to be funny at every turn quite oppressive.
‘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.
The world is full of novels in which characters simply say and do. There are certainly legitimate genres in which this is sufficient. But in real and lasting writing the character is.
I never read detective novels. I started out in graduate school writing a more serious book. Right around that time I read ‘The Day of the Jackal’ and ‘The Exorcist‘. I hadn’t read a lot of commercial fiction, and I liked them.
My dad was always such a frustrated artist. He always worked very hard to support his family, doing a bunch of ridiculous jobs. He wanted to be a painter, but then he also wrote science-fiction novels in his spare time.
I’d like to think that my films are personal enough to exist without hearkening back to their respective novels.
I love it when novels contain a broad cast of characters, including queer ones.
The Sookie Stackhouse novels were selling well before the TV show, but the TV show led to a lot more exposure and readers. And a lot went on to read my other work. It was a wonderful thing for my bank account.
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 feel like I don’t understand time in novels, really. I bumble forward, is all.
I think of novels as houses. You live in them over the course of a long period, both as a reader and as a writer.
People in my novels always have terrible problems. If they are not terrible, I make them more terrible.
All the great novels, all the great films, all the great dramas are fictions that actually tell us the truth about us or about human nature or about human situations without being tied into the minutia of documentary events. Otherwise we might as well just make documentaries.
Science fiction is the ugly stepchild of mainstream literature, and fantasy is the ugly stepchild of science fiction, and tie-in novels are the ugly stepchild of fantasy… and on and on and on.
There’s a sense in all my novels that nothing is certain.
People used to expect literary novels to deepen the experience of living; now they are happy with any sustained display of writerly cleverness.
I’ve always been charmed by houses, and descriptions of them are prominent in my novels. So prominent, in fact, that my editor once pointed out to me that all of my early novels had houses on the covers.
Poetry, fiction as novels or short stories – these are autonomous as created by their authors. They should stand on their own, like pieces of furniture that should be judged as to their usefulness, elegance.
At least half the mystery novels published violate the law that the solution, once revealed, must seem to be inevitable.
I had been attempting novels since I was 14 but always ran out of steam. High hopes, poor craftsmanship.
I certainly think we’re going to see more and more graphic novels and more illustrated novels.
On that other novels followed: but I still wrote fairy tales and dreamy poems of another world.
I used to go with my parents and loved it, I was in school plays, and I started reading plays before I started reading novels. I’ll defend it to the hilt. When theatre is good it is fabulous.
Not many people were speaking truth to power in the ’80s. I had a really good time doing it – I found it gratifying. It was a joy to have an opportunity to say what you believed. It’s challenging to do it in fiction, but I liked writing the novels. I liked writing ‘Democracy‘ particularly.
Novels teach you that actions have consequences. They help you grow up.
For me, novels coalesce into being, rather than arrive fully formed.
I used to feel an obligation to invent things. I felt I was a failure because I didn’t do massive great novels about Australia or the outback or something. I just don’t feel that any more.
Writing novels is the most exciting.
I think I would have been a writer, anyhow, in the sense of having written a story every now and then, or continued writing poetry. But it was the war experience and the two novels I wrote about Vietnam that really got me started as a professional writer.
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.
A lot of Chinese martial arts films were based on Chinese martial arts novels. And these novels created a world of putting history, calligraphy, and martial arts into one.
The Archer novels are about various kinds of brokenness.
Each of my novels has come from a different place, and the processes are not always entirely conscious. I have lived off and on in America for a number of years and so have accumulated observations, found things interesting, been moved to tell stories about them.
I asked a French critic a couple of years ago why my books did so well in France. He said it was because in my novels people both act and think. I got a kick out of that.
Unlike novels with a hero or two heroines, in ‘One Amazing Thing,’ all the characters tell stories they’ve never told anyone before, so all the voices become equally important.
I never could read science fiction. I was just uninterested in it. And you know, I don’t like to read novels where the hero just goes beyond what I think could exist. And it doesn’t interest me because I’m not learning anything about something I’ll actually have to deal with.
I have tried to create main characters who are drastically different from the types who generally appear in crime novels. Mikael Blomkvist, for instance, doesn’t have ulcers or booze problems or an anxiety complex. He doesn’t listen to operas, nor does he have an oddball hobby such as making model airplanes.
A novel and its writer are inseparable: you are your books. A play’s not like that at all. ‘Abandonment‘s not mine – it’s everyone’s. I wanted it to be a co-operative thing because I was tired of that anal control that I have over novels.
My novels aren’t really generated by a single conceptual spark; it’s more a process of many different elements that come together unexpectedly over a long period of time.
One of the more interesting challenges I face when doing research for my novels is to trace the lives of women who are vital to the narrative and try my best to give them back their voices.
Sometimes I – I try not to read too many fiction or novels.
‘Game of Thrones’ is taking dense novels and trying to shrink it all down to a slightly manageable series in the sense that there are so many characters and so many locations.
My early novels were written in quite a dark place. I stand by them, but I would never write them again. I think it is subversive to embrace emotional optimism, because it goes against the grain.
I don’t think you can tell the objective truth about a person. That’s why people write novels.
Iris Murdoch did influence my early novels very much, and influence is never entirely good.
Most publishers seem very reluctant to publish short story collections at all; they bring them out in paperback, often disguised as novels.
When I was young, about 18 or 19, I read all the Dostoyevsky novels, which made me want to go to St. Petersburg. So I went, and I was so inspired.
I started out as a novelist and wrote several novels before deciding to publish one, and I fully intend to go back to the form.
I keep thinking I’ll enjoy suspense novels, and sometimes I do. I’ve read about 20 Dick Francis novels.
Writing novels is so much more satisfying than writing television.
I strongly believe that the art of the novel works best when the writer identifies with whoever he or she is writing about. Novels in the end are based on the human capacity, compassion, and I can show more compassion to my characters if I write in a first person singular.
Publishing a short story can sometimes feel like shouting into the dark… your words come out, and then nothing… but I don’t think that’s why I tend to write novels rather than stories.
It seems to me that good novels celebrate the mystery in ordinary life, and summing it all up in psychological terms strips the mystery away.
Some say it is the elements of hope and wonder in children’s books that make them special. But there are many dark young adult novels these days. Adults loved Harry Potter, though it was written for the young. In the end, it is probably up to the reader of any age to decide if this book is for him or her.
I don’t really consider any of my novels ‘crime’ novels.
I’ve had three novels published, and I was working a little bit in theater in Ireland. I wrote one film script just to see what it would turn out like.
I’m a novelist, that’s how I make my livelihood, and I concentrate on the novels.
Sometimes, a novel is like a train: the first chapter is a comfortable seat in an attractive carriage, and the narrative speeds up. But there are other sorts of trains, and other sorts of novels. They rush by in the dark; passengers framed in the lighted windows are smiling and enjoying themselves.
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.
It’s an article of faith that the novels I’ve loved will live inside me forever.
To me, novels are a trip of discovery, and you discover things that you don’t know and you assume that many of your readers don’t know, and you try to bring them to life on the page.
Novels aren’t pedagogical instruments, or instructions in law or physics or any other discipline. A novel has to be an emotional experience, a trip of the imagination, and because science has raised so many issues that concern and affect humans, it’s a good starting place for me.
When I write, I get glimpses into future novels.
Writing novels preserves you in a state of innocence – a lot passes you by – simply because your attention is otherwise diverted.
You know, I read graphic novels but not encyclopedically.
For me, writing a novel is like solving a puzzle. But I don’t intend my novels as puzzles. I intend them as invitations to dance.
I’d read one too many crime novels where the victim was just a name: body number one, dead woman number 12. I understood fear, and I wanted to create characters who made readers say, ‘Please, don’t hurt this guy.’ That’s the key to suspense. It’s easy to disgust a reader. It’s much harder to make them care.
I’ve never written a movie, I’m not in the movie business. I go out to L.A. and I’m like everyone else wandering around in a daze hoping I see movie stars. I write the novels that the movies are based on, and that feels like enough of a job for me.
If I did only one thing at a time I’d think I was wasting my time. If, for example, I only wrote novels I would feel like a charlatan and a fraud.
For the novels I wrote before selling anything, I didn’t outline much. I had a vague idea of the story.
I didn’t know anything about romance novels until a friend suggested that I try writing one. After I read a few, I realized that my favorite part of fiction had always been the relationship aspect.
Henry Miller wrote novels, but he calls his protagonist Henry, often Henry Miller, and his books are in this gray area between memoir and novel.
I grew up around books – my grandmother’s house, where I lived as a small child, was full of books. My father was a history teacher, and he loved the Russian novels. There were always books around.
In my office in Florida I have, I think, 30 manuscript piles around the room. Some are screenplays or comic books or graphic novels. Some are almost done. Some I’m rewriting. If I’m working with a co-writer, they’ll usually write the first draft. And then I write subsequent drafts.
I was convinced that the only thing I wanted to do ever – was write novels.
When I was little, my grandma used to get romance novels, and she would get hundreds of these, and she’d read a dozen a month.
I mean, there are many other directors who are probably both more skilled and excited to adapt novels or work within certain genre conventions. I’d like to do that kind of work someday, but for better or worse I’m too drawn by my own material.
I’ve seen novels that have grown out of one story in a collection. But it hasn’t occurred to me to take any of those stories and build on them. They seem very finished for me, so I don’t feel like going back and dredging them up.
Novels are a kind of experiment in selfhood, for the reader as well as for the author.
There’s no such thing as the contemporary novel. Before I seem the complete reactionary, let me add that I’ve happily joined in many discussions about ‘the contemporary novel’ where what that usually, unproblematically means is novels that have appeared recently or may appear soon.
The ‘Barnaby’ books were always intended to be graphic novels.
All of my novels are seeded in real life events, and ‘The Wreckage’ is no different.
The book I made it big with in the U.S. was my fourth book, ‘Sanctum.’ My novels sell really well both there and in Canada, so once a year I do a promotional tour, visiting a different city every two days, doing book readings and signings.
Others, amounting to four novels and a mess of short stories which I did not think worth preserving, I have done my best to eliminate from the record by refusing all requests for permission to reprint them, and I hope I have done a good job of making them hard to unearth.
My wife is the most savage critic. She doesn’t feel intimidated by my reputation. As far as she’s concerned, she’s just criticising a boyfriend who’d recently had a go at fiction. She can tell me to abandon whole novels.
Graphic novels are not traditional literature, but that does not mean they are second-rate. Images are a way of writing. When you have the talent to be able to write and to draw, it seems a shame to choose one. I think it’s better to do both.
My poems tend to be more celebratory and lyrical, and the novels so far pretty dark. Poetry doesn’t seem to me to be an appropriate tool for exploring that.
My first two novels were set in the past, and that freed me up in a lot of ways; it allowed me to find my way into my story and my characters through research.
When you put on the suits, when you pretend you’re honest and you’re robbing at a far higher level, these guys deserve to… well, to be in my novels, and I have special fates reserved for them.
When Joseph Wambaugh writes about the LAPD, you listen because you know he knows the scene. Lots of people write cop novels, but they don’t have that authenticity.
When I was one day old, I learned how to read. When I was two days old, I started to write. By the time I was three, I had finished 212 short stories, 38 novels, 730 poems, and one very funny limerick, all before breakfast.
I’ve written only two novels, but they’re both long ones, and they each took a decade to write.
One of the things the novel can do is address big questions in ways that are accessible to people. It’s not that I want to teach people, but these are the things that interest me, and this is my medium for exploring ideas, and I think the potential of novels to do that is massive.
Everything is personal – the poems and the crime novels. I have never been involved in any murders, but there are strong autobiographical elements in each.
All humanity is passion; without passion, religion, history, novels, art would be ineffectual.
Creating artworks, writing and publishing novels, poetry, music, or conducting art-historical research requires support. So does everything else in the world, from physics to fish and wildlife management to human-rights advocacy.
Authors can easily produce ebook versions of novels and shorter work which publishers don’t own.
I never see a novel as a film while I’m writing it. Mostly because novels and films are so different, and I’m such an internal novelist.
I think that I altered history in ‘Elizabeth,’ and I interpreted history far more than Danny Boyle or Richard Attenborough did to ‘Slumdog Millionaire‘ or ‘Gandhi.’ They took Indian novels or Indian characters and very much stayed within the Indian diaspora.
My self-publishing adventure led to my work being picked up by a traditional publisher and eventually hitting the bestseller lists. That led to two more bestselling novels.
My second, third and fourth novels were mistakes, essentially.
Only in novels can we take another human being into our head and create something jointly.
I’ve tried very hard and I’ve never found any resemblance between the people I know and the people in my novels.
