The first sentence of every novel should be: Trust me, this will take time but there is order here, very faint, very human.

If you only write when you’re inspired you may be a fairly decent poet, but you’ll never be a novelist because you’re going to have to make your word count today and those words aren’t...

Superficially my war was a comfortable exercise in futility carried out in a grand Scottish hotel amongst the bridge players and swillers of easy-come-by whisky. My chest got me out of active service and into...

I think that at the bottom of all art lies the impulse to preserve.

A novel, in which all is created by the author’s whim, must strike a more profound level of truth, or it is worthless.””And yet, I have heard you say that any novel that relieves your...

I write about romance and passion to savour love twice, in the moment and in retrospect.

Spilling a Secret What its size, will have varying consequences. It’s not possible to predict what will happen if you open the gunnysack, let the cat escape. A liberated feline might purr on your lap,...

It is only Cecilia, or Camilla, or Belinda”; 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...

Faction is that hybrid of documented fact and novelistic elaboration.

Reading a novel after reading semiotic theory was like jogging empty-handed after jogging with hand weights. What exquisite guilt she felt, wickedly enjoying narrative! Madeleine felt safe with a nineteenth century novel. There were going...

A mysterious ability, a broken promise, a life changed forever…

…While I rather doubt whether, as has often been claimed, everyone has at least one novel inside them, it is undeniably true of theories…

I write to find strength.I write to become the person that hides inside me.I write to light the way through the darkness for others.I write to be seen and heard.I write to be near those...

That was how the heroine of a book would play it and Diana was still writing her own story the best heroines she’d always believed took their fate into their own hands.

If you cannot judge a book by its cover, surely we should not judge an author by one book alone?

When I work, I’m just translating the world around me in what seems to be straightforward terms. For my readers, this is sometimes a vision that’s not familiar. But I’m not trying to manipulate reality....

Let them Teach,Let them learn,let them pray,for the world is theirs.

Sometimes we need enemies more than we need friends. Mandy Walker

Find the things that matter, and hold on to them, and fight for them, and refuse to let them go.

Do you want to know how to write novels? I’ll tell you the secret: start on page one and keep going, in order, until you come to the last page. Then stop.

A group of ten prisoners from Dachau, I was with them, we hid in the forest to wait for the Americans. The Germans had already left everything behind. We had food but no weapons. For...

If there was any great lesson in life it was this: No battle was ever won with silence.

The attraction of reading is that it allows you to live, for a few hours, as someone else—grants you access to their head, their thoughts, their secrets.

If the shining sun blinds the eye,it makes sense. But to be blinded by gold and silver!

La vie ressemble plus souvent à un roman qu’un roman ne ressemble à la vie.”(“Life resembles a novel more often than novels resemble life.”)

People who wrote novels about universities hardly ever got them right. Max had spent his short working life untenured, but still he’d managed to be a charming magnet wherever he taught, and Amy had surfeited...

Everything that ever happened to me that was important happened in the desert.

After all, isn’t the purpose of the novel, or of a museum, for that matter, to relate our memories with such sincerity as to transform individual happiness into a happiness all can share?

As it is I’m a dated novelist, whom hardly anybody reads, or if they do, most of them don’t understand what I am on about. Certainly I wish I had never written Voss, which is...

Mom made me say it over and over, Keep it hidden, keep it safe. If anyone truly knew everything, it would freak them out in a large way. It freaks the shit out of me...

Early on, for better or worse, I chose whose child I wanted to be: the child of the novel. Almost everything else was subjugated to this ruling passion, reading stories. As a consequence, I can...

Short stories are often treated as the poor cousins of novels.

If every book was judged by its cover, very few would be read; education would be limited, and fewer movies would be made.

The anxiety, which in this state of their attachment must be the portion of Henry and Catherine, and of all who loved either, as to its final event, can hardly extend, I fear, to the...

Slow down to speed up. Anonymous

Creativity is a commodity and derives its value only in how energy is spent.

Poetry, plays, novels, music, they are the cry of the human spirit trying to understand itself and make sense of our world.

Up until then, whenever anyone had mentioned the possibility of making a film adaptation, my answer had always been, ‘No, I’m not interested.’ I believe that each reader creates his own film inside his head,...

If you haven’t cried at least once while writing a chapter of your inspirational book, then you have to ask yourself if your’re writing fiction.

She found herself longing for home-not just for the hotel but for New York and all the real novels that she could lose herself in there.

Fiction in general holds little interest for me. Novels, in particular, arouse more suspicion than intrigue. It truly baffles me that any practitioner of make-believe should (especially in this day and age) feel the need...

It’s my contention that each book creates its own structure and its own length. I’ve written three or four slim books. It may be that the next novel is a big one, but I don’t...

Life is something that no one can teach you,You have to learn it.

When you’ve got creative momentum, the last thing you want to do is stop. I’d write and write and wake up with my head slumped over and my fingers still on the keyboard and the...

I already know about human beings.

What are American dry-goods? asked the duchess, raising her large hands in wonder and accentuating the verb.American novels, answered Lord Henry.

Writers remember everything…especially the hurts. Strip a writer to the buff, point to the scars, and he’ll tell you the story of each small one. From the big ones you get novels. A little talent...

It is a wonderful thing to be liked by a stranger, but without respect it is pointless. It is like pulling the pedals off a rose and throwing the stem at the person you like....

When I want to read a novel, I write one.

Art, though, is never the voice of a country; it is an even more precious thing, the voice of the individual, doing its best to speak, not comfort of any sort, but truth. And the...