Quotes About Perspective

The novelist wants to know how things will turn out; the historian already knows how things turned out, but wants to know why they turned out the way they did.

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

I'm a novelist, not a social scientist or a commentator.

Noir is dead for me because historically, I think it's a simple view. I've taken it as far as it can go. I think I've expanded on it a great deal, taken it further than any other American novelist.

I'm not a biographer, I'm a novelist.

Freud was just a novelist.

I'm a middle-class, middle-brow novelist. And that's it. It amuses me.

As a young, ambitious novelist, writing for kids never crossed my mind.

Like all novelists, I'm interested in the filters between reality and the imagination.

Novelists are no more moral or certain than anybody else; we are ideologically adrift, and if we are any good then our writing will live in several places at once. That is both our curse and our charm.

Novelists can ask - they can ask for anything - but their books are their answers in advance.

In my view, the plangent artificiality of a lot of creative work results from the fact that the people who write novels, direct films and put on plays tend to read too many novels, watch too many films and go to too many plays.

You know, I read graphic novels but not encyclopedically.

I don't think I'm interested in writing women's novels anymore.

I almost always use first person voice in my novels. It has its limitations, but it gives a sense of immediacy that's hard to create with an anonymous, all-seeing narrator.

I have assiduously avoided calling my books novels.

I never see a novel as a film while I'm writing it. Mostly because novels and films are so different, and I'm such an internal novelist.

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

I started thinking about the endings of novels not because I think endings are so important, but because I think they're actually not as important as they're sometimes given credit for.

I feel like it's hard to get into historical novels where you know what the story is far too well.

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

Some critics said, 'Hey, why are you writing historical novels?' I say they're not historical, they're contemporary, because people walking around who lived through this, even a little bit, they carry it inside. The contemporary isn't just what you can see now.

For most Americans, my Chinese music feels like a novelty, and it's not what it is for me.

If words are doing their job, then their novelty will not be the most noticeable thing about them.