I find coming up with a title the hardest part of writing a novel.
You know, the point of a novel - or to me, the point of a novel, the gift of a novel is to go really deeply inside people's lives and inside their personal experiences.
Although every novel is derived directly from another novel, there is really only one novel, the Quixote.
When I want to read a novel, I write one.
I don't see novels ending with any real sense of closure.
I just finished a novel, and I'm back kind of noodling on the screenplays. Screenplays are tough. I am making music, I'm just not sure what kind of music it is or where it's going.
I think you can tell, when you meet someone, whether they read novels or not. There is some little hollowness if they don't.
Writing doesn't come real easy to me. I couldn't write a novel in a year. It wouldn't be readable. I don't let an editor even look at it until the second year, because it would just scare them. I just have to trust that all these scraps and dead-ends will find a way.
When you write a novel, you make other people see your imaginary friends.
THE ABULON DANCE is an intricate and fast-paced novel of political intrigue and clashing alien cultures. The characterizations are rich, detailed, and subtle, the action engrossing. I finished it in a single sitting.
The 'information novel' shouldn't be a curiosity. It should be absolutely mainstream.
I loved this smart, funny, big-hearted novel. As hilarious and wise as early Philip Roth, The Mathematician's Shiva will delight and move you.
The only obligation to which in advance we may hold a novel, without incurring the accusation of being arbitrary, is that it be interesting.
Around the time I turned 30, I wanted to publish a novel
Starting a novel is opening a door on a misty landscape; you can still see very little but you can smell the earth and feel the wind blowing.
Every once in awhile you find a novel so magical that there is no escaping its spell. The Night Circus is one of these rarities - engrossing, beautifully written and utterly enchanting. If you choose to read just one novel this year, this is it
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 give novels as gifts, and there is nothing I like to receive more as a gift.
The result of a public that has a very high consumption rate and turnover rate is people listen to more music but spend less time with individual bits of music. It's made me more likely to put things up quickly and treat it more like a magazine instead of a novel.
I would look at the first chapter of any new novel as a final test of its merits. If there was a murdered man under the sofa in the first chapter, I read the story. If there was no murdered man under the sofa in the first chapter, I dismissed the story as tea-table twaddle, which it often really was.