Quotes About Novel

I started a novel right before 'The Imitation Game,' so it's funny now, four years later, to be coming almost back to finishing it.

I took inspiration from 'Fountainhead,' the way in which Ayn Rand conveyed her political philosophy through an immensely popular novel.

I was really impressed by '2312.'

I'm always really impressed when a movie can function like a novel does - that's so hard to do.

One of the stories that really impressed me was 'Anna Karenina.' As a novel, that made an impression on me, showing me what the novel can do.

I was paid more for the serialization rights for each book than I got as an advance for my first novel. In other words, there is an economic value in serialization in and of itself.

If I'm a genre writer, I'm at the edge. In the end, they do work like genre fiction. You have a hero, there's a love interest, there's always a chase, there's fighting of some kind. You don't have to do that in a novel. But you do in a genre novel.

I once gave a character in a novel my inability to get past the same point in any work of philosophy: that moment when seeing is suddenly occluded and you know you can go no further.

When you're adapting a novel, there are always scenes taken out of the book, and no matter which scenes they are, it's always someone's favorite. As a screenwriter, you realize, 'Well, it doesn't work if you include everyone's favorite scenes.'

I've always been interested in writing about people, including young children who are not able to speak for themselves. As in my novel 'Black Water,' I provide a voice for someone who has died and can't speak for herself.

I've got an original graphic novel called 'The Indian and the Bandit' that I'm writing with a childhood friend.

First drafts are for learning what your novel or story is about. Revision is working with that knowledge to enlarge & enhance an idea, to reform it . . . Revision is one of the true pleasures of writing.

Writing a novel is hard work but it feels great to have the printed copy in my hand. Tonight I celebrate with the Laneway Press team who have helped me so very much. Prepare for the popping of corks!

By the way, the best place to find names for fictional characters, if you are ever foolish enough to write a novel, is in a Bradshaw or an ABC. All the nicest people always sound like railway stations.

I am careful about fiction. A novel is not a tract or an essay. If I want to write about land reforms, or Hindu-Muslim relations, or position of women, I can do it as it affects my characters as in 'A Suitable Boy.' I could only write about issues specifically through essays. But I'll do that only if I have something worthwhile to say.

I was so obsessed by Lisbeth Salander and all the characters, but of course if you're going to write a crime novel worthy of Stieg Larsson, you need a plot, don't you?

I had met many wounded veterans at Walter Reed Army Medical Center when I was researching my 2009 novel 'The Turnaround,' and I continue to be very interested in how returning servicemen and women deal with their new lives back home and how they're treated by America.

I never thought about writing a novel until I was 13, and that happened by chance. I was on school holidays, and I was bored, and I thought I just wanted to do something to occupy myself instead of asking, 'What can I do, mum? Entertain me.' I started, and it really just took over, and I realised, 'Wow, this is an amazing experience.'

Straightforward fiction functions only as more Bubble Wrap, nostalgia, retreat.

I would say I'm a storyteller first, but game making is very wrapped up in how I think of story. If I were to have a story idea, and I decided to write a novel with it instead, I'd have to very consciously de-couple it from gamedom - for example, deliberately add in things that could not be represented in a game scene.

My whole reputation and creative thought as a novelist is really wrapped around Harry Bosch, so he's near and dear.

I was born January 6, 1937, eight years after Wall Street crashed and two years before John Steinbeck published The Grapes of Wrath, his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel about the plight of a family during the Great Depression.

When I tell people there are three stories in 'Thunderstruck' that were from the same wrecked novel, they want to guess what they are. Nobody has. There are no characters or timelines in common. They're structured very differently. A good novel wouldn't have pulled apart so easily.

In some ways, the best novel about terrorism, though it's not a novel, is 'The Looming Tower' by Lawrence Wright or 'Perfect Soldiers' by Terry McDermott.