Quotes About Inspiration

Everyone deserves to be the hero of a novel.

The fire burns as the novel taught it how.

A good novel is a good novel, pointe finale. And I think what I'm writing is exactly that.

In the early Seventies, I started writing a little autobiographical novel about my childhood - I made it into a mystery story.

A lot of times, the inspiration for a novel is a messy bird's nest of shiny things. Little things that don't make a whole lot of sense or that, no matter how hard you look, cannot be found directly in the finished book.

There is no better way of elevating the novel than by making it into a construct which contains ideas.

I always wanted to use my newspaper background in a novel.

I think each time you start a story or novel or whatever, you are absolutely at the bottom of the ladder all over again. It doesn't matter what you've done before.

Every novel generates its own climate, when you get going.

I was thinking about what I wanted to write next, after my first novel, and had decided that I wanted to write a story with a lot of strong female characters in it.

Actually, I enjoy the process of writing a big long novel.

No one knows how to write a novel until it's been written.

Today I began the novel that I determined to be great.

I took two years away from making films to write a novel.

People really want to think that these things really happened. I don't know why that important, but I know that when I finish reading a novel or something, I want to know how much of that really happened to this author.

When I start getting close to the end of a novel, something registers in the back of my mind for the next novel, so that I usually don't write, or take notes. And I certainly don't begin. I just allow things to percolate for a while.

So, I outlined a horror novel and started writing.

For me, writing a short story is much, much harder than writing a novel.

There are hours when I must force the novel out of my mind and be interested in the children.

I wanted to write a novel. At 12 I knew, I am a writer. I said it to nobody.

And I don't want to begin something, I don't want to write that first sentence until all the important connections in the novel are known to me. As if the story has already taken place, and it's my responsibility to put it in the right order to tell it to you.

I had the notion that I wanted to write the great dirty American novel, so I went to Roanoke College on the GI Bill.

I'm working on a nonfiction book on Nepal and a novel about diasporas.

I don't think anyone has written a great graphic novel.