Ending a novel is almost like putting a child to sleep – it can't be done abruptly.
A novel, like a myth or any great work of art, can become an initiation that helps us to make a painful rite of passage from one phase of life, one state of mind, to another. A novel, like a myth, tea...
The great novels are deterrents. A Merck's manual on how not to live.
In any case, it seems to me that all over the world people nowadays prefer to judge rather than to understand, to answer rather than to ask, so that the voice of the novel can hardly be heard over the...
Writing a novel is actually searching for victims. As I write I keep looking for casualties. The stories uncover the casualties.
The stupidity of people comes from having an answer for everything. The wisdom of the novel comes from having a question for everything....The novelist teaches the reader to comprehend the world as a...
Novels are what I know, and the novel door in my personality is always open.
What the best novels and novelists do is to offer a different way of seeing.
We trust to novels to train us in the practice of great indignations and great generositie.
A short story I have written long ago would barge into my house in the middle of the night, shake me awake and shout, 'Hey,this is no time for sleeping! You can't forget me, there's still more to writ...
Novels for me are how I find out what's going on in my own head. And so that's a really useful and indeed critical thing to do when you do as many of these other things as I do.
[T]he success of every novel -- if it's a novel of action -- depends on the high spots. The thing to do is to say to yourself, "What are my big scenes?" and then get every drop of juice out of them.",...
The battles may last for a long time, perhaps even years. There are powerful forces on both sides, and the war is important to both armies. It's not a battle of good against evil. It's a war between f...
I am certain that a novelist is someone who attributes a different reality-value to the characters and events of his story than to those of 'real' life. A novelist is someone who confuses his own life...
Writers of novels live in a strange world where what's made up is as important as what's real.
I think after all I found a feature which is incredible and kind of mein or let's say it something which is part of my childhood in the Jack Ketchum Novels and films.
I write about romance and passion to savour love twice, in the moment and in retrospect.
It is only a novel... or, in short, only some work in which the greatest powers of the mind are displayed, in which the most thorough knowledge of human nature, the happiest delineation of its varieti...
I lived through those books, songs, television shows, and movies - the way the characters talked, looked, acted. I thought that could translate over into reality, that I could make their world my worl...
Ideas are cheap. Writing them into a freakin' 90k word novel is the hard part.