I often find that a novel, even a well-written and compelling novel, can become a blur to me soon after I’ve finished reading it. I recollect perfectly the feeling of reading it, the mood I...

Ruskin says that anyone who expects perfection from a work of art knows nothing of works of art. This is an appealing sentence that, so far as I can see, is not true about a...

A novel is never anything but a philosophy expressed in images. And in a good novel the philosophy has disappeared into the images.

I love the longueurs of a book even if they seem pointless because you can get a peek into the author’s mind, a glimpse of their creative soul.

Part of the desire to see each other succeed is to stop putting a price on success.

I like shape very much. A novel has to have shape, and life doesn’t have any.

Thank God For Writing, As Now I Can Work Until My Last Breath!

Writing fiction is the act of weaving a series of lies to arrive at a greater truth.

A freedom given up is not so easily regained.

All of fiction is truthful. What you create is your own truth and no one can take that away or change it.

Maybe, it is just enough to believe with a positive heart that people didn’t let you down. It could be just this: They couldn’t give you the compassion you really wanted based on where their...

Remember where you are and adjust yourself accordingly, not vice-versa … otherwise, you might be toast.

I looked for any footmarks of course, but naturally, with all this rain, there wasn’t a sign. Of course, if this were a detective story, there’d have been a convenient shower exactly an hour before...

When you grow up to be an author and write books, you’ll think you’re making the books up, but they’ll all really be true, somewhere.

We did photograph albums, best dresses, favourite novels, and once someone’s own novel. It was about a week in a telephone box with a pair of pyjamas called Adolf Hitler. The heroine was a piece...

Life must not be a novel that is given to us, but one that is made by us.

[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...

Life is painful and disappointing. It is useless, therefore, to write new realistic novels. We generally know where we stand in relation to reality and don’t care to know any more.

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?