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.

If you only write when inspired, you may be a fairly decent poet, but you’ll never be a novelist.

As far as I am concerned, I write novels, and other people can do the labelling.

Two questions form the foundation of all novels: “What if?” and “What next?” (A third question, “What now?”, is one the author asks himself every 10 minutes or so; but it’s more a cry than...

There are three secrets to writing a novel. Unfortunately nobody knows what they are.