I am no indiscriminate novel reader. The mere trash of the common circulating library I hold in the highest contempt.
My novels come from within me; they are things I feel I want to do.
All novels are experimental.
It's weird - I don't feel like I'm a better or more confident writer because I'm publishing something. I think, for most writers as well, it's like reinventing the wheel every time. I have no idea what I'm doing writing a novel, and in some ways, it's the only way to do it.
I have learned a great deal from novels. Some of it is even true.
for me the novel is a social vehicle, it reflects society.
I've never taken any classes or had formal training in writing novels. At its most basic, I learned how to structure a novel.
I'm skeptical that the novel will be "reinvented. " If you start thinking about a medical textbook or something, then, yes, I think that's ripe for reinvention. You can imagine animations of a beating heart. But I think the novel will thrive in its current form. That doesn't mean that there won't be new narrative inventions as well. But I don't think they'll displace the novel.
Diana felt she was beginning to understand why, in all those novels she read, the headiest loves were the loves that couldn't be.
The novel should be understood as a structure built to accommodate the greatest possible amount of cool stuff.
I read novels but I also read the Bible. And study it, you know? And the more I learn, the more excited I get.
You can't have a novel without real, believable people, and once you get into either too theoretical a novel or too philosophical a novel, you get into the dangers that the French novel has discovered in the past 50 or 60 years. And you get into a sort of aridity. No, you have to have real, identifiable people to whom the reader reacts in a way as if they were real people.
You know what I did after I wrote my first novel? I shut up and wrote twenty-three more.
Steve Coogan picks up enough to lecture an interviewer: This is a postmodern novel before there was any modernism to be post about. Later it's claimed that Tristram Shandy was No. 8 on the Observer's list of the greatest novels, which cheers everyone until they discover the list was chronological.
You are accidentally leaving your DNA all over everything in a novel because it's all coming from you.
I've never put Northern Ireland into a novel because it's not my territory. I come from the South, so my imaginative territory is very much the Republic of Ireland rather than the North. Even though, if I wrote a novel about the North, it might sell more.
I've realized that with each novel I seem to set out a kind of puzzle for myself. And I am never sure in the process of writing a first draft how it's all going to turn out.
The only reason for the existence of a novel is that it does attempt to represent life.
The novel is rescued life.
Raymond Carver had the quote that I loved about how he felt that a short story was the moment right before someone's life was about to fall apart. You can't really do that with a novel, but with a story you're just left hanging.