Quotes About Imagination

There are no laws for the novel. There never have been, nor can there ever be.

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

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

So, I outlined a horror novel and started writing.

If you're writing a novel, you're in a room for three or four years. There's not much coming in from the outside.

So, I guess the answer to your question is very few people can bring off a novel of the future because it's just so damn hard to make it look like the future.

The novel is not so much a literary genre, but a literary space, like a sea that is filled by many rivers.

In a novel, on the other hand, you not only have to describe the rooms, but the clothes, the characters and what they are thinking. It's a much more in-depth process.

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

My family can always tell when I'm well into a novel because the meals get very crummy.

Journalism can go right up to the door of the room in which the decisions are made. A novel can go inside the room - and inside the character's heads.

When I feel like being a director, I write a novel.

That seems to be the definition of 'novel' for me: a story that hasn't yet discovered a way to be brief.

A certain luxury when you get to writing a novel is to have the space to have your characters just banter.

The state of childhood resonates with life inside a fantasy novel. If you have no control over how you spend large chunks of your day, or are at the mercy of flawed giant beings, then the desire to bend the laws of the world by magic is strong and deep.

The great advantage of a novel is you can put in whatever comes into your head - it has the same shape as the human brain.

I never know as a writer when I set out into a novel where it's going to take me.

The job of the novelist is to invent: to embroider, to color, to embellish, to make things up.

Irish novelist John Banville has a creepy, introverted imagination.

I had thought of writing, actually, and that later on I'd be a novelist.

Even if there is endless documentation, it would be impossible to know what a man thought inside his own mind... This is where the novelist's creative imagination has to take over.

The historian will tell you what happened. The novelist will tell you what it felt like.