Quotes About Authorship

I started writing short fiction very briefly, as I imagine is the case for some novelists.

Novelists have to be adept at controlling the flow of information, and, most crucially, they have to be in charge of the narrative.

I saw novelists as being admirable people and I thought... I thought... maybe, one day, I could be one of them.

Novelists seem to fall into two distinct categories - those that plan and those that just see where it takes them. I am very much the former category.

'Great Expectations' was an important novel in my adolescence. It was very much one of those emblematic novels that made me wish I could write like that. It helped that my models as a writer were dead over a hundred years before I began to write.

In the writing of novels, there is the problem of how to shape a narrative.

I wrote about four novels before I wrote a word of journalism.

It took me six novels before I felt confident of my voice as a writer.

Grand Central really didn't want me doing anything under my own name but the 'Kitty' novels.

Novels give you the opportunity to create a whole world. Because you create people, you make them talk... You decide who they are, whether they live or die. It's the closest thing to feeling like a god that you can come to.

Fiction novels, that's my game.

I write novels and other things.

I spend about a year between novels.

In effect I am not a novelist, but rather a failed essayist who started to write novels because he didn't know how to write essays.

I have assiduously avoided calling my books novels.

I have written every one of my novels to convince somebody of something.

I was writing novels in high school and apprenticed myself in a way both to Faulkner and to Hemingway.

I don't really consider any of my novels 'crime' novels.

When I was in my early 20s, my dream was to write mystery novels. I wanted to do what my favourite crime writer, Ross Macdonald, did - crank out a book a year. The only problem - and it was a considerable one - was that I stank.

Sometimes I ask myself if writing novels is even respectable.

When I write, I get glimpses into future novels.

I never plan my novels because if I know what is going to happen, it bores me rigid. I let the story tell itself.

I have many books that I want to write; I'd like to think that I'll be around for another 20 years or so and write another dozen novels, probably some sort of imaginative literature... Never again another seven-volume saga.

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