Quotes About Insight

If I do a film, I go to the place where it is based on, interact with people, and then, I believe, you pick up things without you even noticing.

I'm a big believer in the notion that to know where you are going, you have to know where everything has been.

Before I was reading science fiction, I read Hemingway. Farewell to Arms was my first adult novel that said not everything ends well. It was one of those times where reading has meant a great deal to me, in terms of my development - an insight came from that book.

Only in a novel are all things given full play.

It's always fun to talk about a novel.

A novel captures essence that is not possible in any other form.

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.

You know, the point of a novel - or to me, the point of a novel, the gift of a novel is to go really deeply inside people's lives and inside their personal experiences.

A novel makes it possible to understand not just events, but the people who control the events; not only their choices, but also their motives.

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.

It's good training for a novelist to try to discern the truth about a place after only a few glimpses of it.

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.

Freud was just a novelist.

For years, I felt I was a novelist, but now I know I can write short fiction.

I'm a novelist first, and I wrote a bunch of books, and everything I write, I just find people are more interesting when there's an element of humor to it.

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

I love novels where not much 'happens' but where the interest is in the ideas and analyses of characters.

I write novels because there is something I don't understand in reality.

Only in novels can we take another human being into our head and create something jointly.

I read novels for entertainment rather than for edification, so I tend not to read the sort of novels that are said to illuminate the human condition.

Every now and then, I have a deep thought.

My ideas tend to arise out of nowhere when I'm not intentionally trying to think of something.

Ideas sometimes come from nowhere, and sometimes they take lots of thinking.

I've written a lot of books which are written from the moon - the view from nowhere.