Almost without exception, my novels are rooted in Israel because that's the place I know well.
In 1980, I published my first novel, in the usual swirl of unjustified hope and justified anxiety.
This novel has it all--mystery, psychological insight, emotional truth, and--most important--characters whose lives matter. You'll fall in love with these families. Solti writes with such passion it is inescapable, lyrical, and profoundly moving. The Forgetting Tree goes on my top ten list.
I'm working on a new novel, in its 3rd draft, but it's hard to write while doing 7th Heaven.
He was a guy who talked with commas, like a heavy novel. Over the phone anyway.
He thought of trying to explain something he had recently noticed about himself: that if anyone insulted him, or one of his friends, he didn't really mind--or not much, anyway. Whereas if anyone insulted a novel, a story, a poem that he loved, something visceral and volcanic occurred within him. He wasn't sure what this might mean--except perhaps that he had got life and art mixed up, back to front, upside down.
I do always know where I'm going in my books. I know the endpoint. I've written only two thousand words of my next novel but I know what the ending will be already.
Many great authors of the 19th century wrote under conditions of strict censorship. The great thing about the art of writing a novel, is that you can write about anything. All you have to say is that it's fiction.
When I am writing novels I don't read a lot of novels so I try to catch up in-between.
Every time I read a Jane Austen novel, I feel like a bartender at the gates of heaven.
I don't read that many novels, I'm more of a nonfiction fan.
History is a novel for which the people is the author.
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 really feel the novel has certain conveniences about it and has something so fundamental about it you could almost say that as long as there is paper, there is going to be the novel.
As to my writing short pieces, there are two reasons I can give you. The first is my invincible laziness. The second is that I've always been fond of short stories, and it always took me some trouble to get through a novel.
For me, George Saunders novel [Lincoln in the Bardo] is about a problem of pain.
Most people who seek attention and regard by announcing that they're writing a novel are actually so devoid of narrative talent that they can't hold the attention of a dinner table for thirty seconds, even with a dirty joke.
I read *old* novels. The reason is simple. I prefer proper endings.
It's the technique, I think, of writing a novel that is difficult for a nonfiction writer.
Every once in a while I feel the tremendous force of the novel. But it does not stay with me.