In writing a novel, when in doubt, have two guys come through the door with guns.

The best plot twists are the ones you didn’t expect.

The true magic of novels dwells within us individually. Each reader will interpret every single character, scene, and metaphor in a slightly different way

Destiny is as it is. Nothing can change it. Accept it before it ruins you.

Novels are forged in passion, demand fidelity and commitment, often drive you to boredom or rage, sleep with you at night. They are the long haul. They are marriage. Stories, on the other hand, you...

A novel is always more complicated than it seems at the beginning. Indeed a novel should be more complicated than it seems at the beginning.

There is no endTo what a living worldWill demand of you.

I don’t really consider any of my novels ‘crime’ novels.

Cecy, I do think it is unfair. People in novels are fainting all the time, and I never can, no matter how badly I need to.

In crime books it’s possible to chart forensic technology by how well it has to be explained to a reader. In mid-Victorian crime novels fingerprinting has to be explained because it’s new. Nowadays it’s part...

The worst feature of the Common Core is its anti-humanistic, utilitarian approach to education. It mistakes what a child is and what a human being is for. That is why it has no use for...

Free time is a terrible thing to waste. Read a book.

You have to be careful what you write and not allow self righteousness to cloud your ability to be objective. This story is not about you, it’s about people and things that no one else...

She’d obviously read the book many times before, and so she read flawlessly and confidently, and I could hear her smile in the reading of it, and the sound of that smile made me think...

The Best Deal Is The One Where Everyone Walks Away Happy!

Life is’nt about getting everything you want the instant you want it.Some thing are worth waiting for.

Novels are make-believe and play for adults.

I now understand that writing fiction was a seed planted in my soul, though I would not be ready to grow that seed for a long time.

You might lose battles in your life time. However, every person that stands bravely on the side of justice, for people that have no voice, wins the true battle—Gods.

Novels institutionalize the ruse of eros. It becomes a narrative texture of sustained incongruence, emotional and cognitive. It permits the reader to stand in triangular relation to the characters in the story and reach into...

In the post-Warhol era a single gesture such as uncrossing one’s legs will have more significance than all the pages in War and Peace.

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...

We all dream dreams of unity, of purity; we all dream that there’s an authoritative voice out there that will explain things, including ourselves. If it wasn’t for our longing for these things, I doubt...

Novels arise out of the shortcomings of history.

That’s what novels are: They’re amalgams of archetypes, collections of random traits one observes in other people through life, blended into fresh characters.

Sir,’ said Stephen, ‘I read novels with the utmost pertinacity. I look upon them–I look upon good novels–as a very valuable part of literature, conveying more exact and finely-distinguished knowledge of the human heart and...

The novels we read allow us to encounter possible persons, versions of ourselves hat we would never see, never permit ourselves to see, never permit ourselves to become, in places we can never go and...

I read anything that’s going to be interesting. But you don’t know what it is until you’ve read it. Somewhere in a book on the history of false teeth there’ll be the making of a...

i love purple and blue!!!!!

I’ll never turn her away, Clyde. She’s my mate. I’ll protect her till my dying breath. I’ll even swallow my pride and ask a favor as momentous as the one I just asked of a...

If I would have known I was going to leave my job that day to become a writer, I probably would have planned differently… It didn’t come by way of illness per se, accident, or...

Novels are just another kind of cross-dressing, aren’t they?

The essentials,” I answered, “are to learn to shape God with forethought, care, and work; to educate and benefit their community, their families, and themselves; and to contribute to the fulfillment of the Destiny.

On the morning after the daring theft of a priceless James Ensor painting from the Grand Palais in Paris, I was allowed to leave the Les Halles Police Station after only a few hours of...

Novels are fictions and therefore they tell lies, but through those lies every novelist attempts to tell the truth about the world.

The moon will guide you through the night with her brightness, but she will always dwell in the darkness, in order to be seen.

I think the reason novels are regarded to have so much more ‘information’ than films is that they outsource the scenic design and cinematography to the reader… This, for me, is a powerful argument for...

The show must go on, and so must The Book.

Ideas are cheap. Writing them into a freakin’ 90k word novel is the hard part.

Express yourself, Express your life, Express the Moment, Live the life.

A Decision That Can Change Your Life Forever, Can Happen In Just One Second.

I read daily, not so much for the benefit of my writing, but because I am addicted to it. There is nothing in the world for me that compares to being lost in a really...

Only in novels can we take another human being into our head and create something jointly.

Now and then I am asked as to ‘what books a statesman should read,’ and my answer is, poetry and novels – including short stories under the head of novels.

Do not start me on The Da Vinci Code … a novel so bad that it gives bad novels a bad name.”(Discussion at Woodruff Auditorium in Lawrence, KS; October 7, 2005.)

You don’t read Gatsby, I said, to learn whether adultery is good or bad but to learn about how complicated issues such as adultery and fidelity and marriage are. A great novel heightens your senses...

About some books we feel that our reluctance to return to them is the true measure of our admiration. It is hard to suppose that many people go back, from a spontaneous desire, to reread...

Meredith immersed herself in the novels. For some reason, fiction hit on the meaning of life so much more concisely than real life itself did.

It is untrue that fiction is nonutilitarian. The uses of fiction are synonymous with the uses of literature. They include refreshment, clarification of life, self-awareness, expansion of our range of experiences, and enlargement of our...

Novels arise out of the shortcoings of history.