Writing a novel is not method acting and I find it easy to step out of it at cocktail hour.
Diana felt she was beginning to understand why, in all those novels she read, the headiest loves were the loves that couldn't be.
I think of my novels as entertainments.
I have almost completed a long novel, but it is unpublishable until my death and England's.
Dastardly devious, cleverly conceived, and just a whole lot of fun to read, DEATH PERCEPTION is Lee Allen Howard on fire and at his finest. Rife with winsome weirdness, it's like the mutant stepchild of Carl Hiaasen and Stephen King, mixing a truly unique paranormal coming-of-age story with a quirky cast of offbeat noir characters into a novel that's simply unforgettable. . . and hilariously original. A supernatural crime story, blazing with creative intrigue. . . don't miss it.
I don't ever think about the utility of fiction. I don't believe in it or certainly don't require anybody to consider it. A novel or short story might be useful to a reader in all kinds of ways, many of which no writer would ever foresee, which is a good thing.
I do think a good story in a novel is fair game and there's nothing wrong with adapting that. It sometimes gets a bit facile where they think: "Let's get the next best-seller and see if we can turn it into a film. "
Yes, I was good at reading people. I studied them so I could put them in my novels.
I love to read and teach experimental fiction but yes, neither this work nor my first novel is really that experimental. It uses some experimental techniques but in the end, I would not say that it is experimental. I'm not sure why. I do a lot of writing on my own, and I have always just written this way.
Every once in a while I feel the tremendous force of the novel. But it does not stay with me.
It was an old fashioned house --the sort of house in fact, as Strange expressed it, which a lady in a novel might like to be persecuted in.
I always write my novels with music (I don't listened to the music seriously. ) Music seems to encourage me.
I'm just giving you some spiel, the ludicrous plot of a novel, a story I invented to touch your heart—one-third bullshit, one-third booze, and one-third genuine tenderness, you know the kind of thing.
Truly novel inventions emerge only in one's youth. Later one becomes ever more experienced, famous-and foolish.
I was writing an earnest novel about cruises in the Caribbean and I just started writing 'Bridget Jones' to get some money, to finance this earnest work, and then I chucked it out.
In 1980, I published my first novel, in the usual swirl of unjustified hope and justified anxiety.
There's a lot of ignorance about how long it takes to write a novel. There's a lot of ignorance about how long a novel is in your head before you start to write it.
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.
Most publishers seem very reluctant to publish short story collections at all; they bring them out in paperback, often disguised as novels.
We're a culture that's obsessed with people who make and who squander ridiculous amounts of wealth, which seemed an obsession well worth interrogating in a novel. That probably accounts for what some have called the book's "sweeping" feel, but I don't know that I set out to be cinematic. I wouldn't know how to do that in a novel, specifically.