Quotes About Creation

No matter how ephemeral it is, a novel is something, while despair is nothing.

I don't begin a novel with a shopping list - the novel becomes my shopping list as I write it.

A novel usually begins, in my experience, with a thought or image that won't leave me alone.

I wanted to write a big novel, something epic in scale.

Everything in a novel has to be intentional, even the things that aren't.

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

No one knows how to write a novel until it's been written.

Today I began the novel that I determined to be great.

The novel doesn't come into existence until certain methods of reproducing fiction come along.

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 begin a novel or a screenplay until I know the ending. And I don't mean only that I have to know what happens. I mean that I have to hear the actual sentences. I have to know what atmosphere the words convey.

Writing in a near frenzy is wonderful and freeing, but for me, it did not result in a nice, shiny novel. Instead, what I have is a mess.

Writing in a near-frenzy is wonderful and freeing but, for me, it does not result in a nice shiny novel. Instead what I have is a mess.

The short story is an imploding universe. It has all the boil of energy inside it. A novel has shrapnel going all over the place. You can have a mistake in a novel. A short story has to be perfect.

Novelists are in the business of constructing consciousness out of words, and that's what we all do, cradle to grave. The self is a story we tell.

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

It feels like when novelists say they find their characters are doing things they never thought they'd do, the material comes alive, and that's how I feel making music.

I'd like to think that my films are personal enough to exist without hearkening back to their respective novels.

Novels usually evolve out of 'character.' Characters generate stories, and the shape of a novel is entirely imagined but should have an aesthetic coherence.

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.

For me, novels coalesce into being, rather than arrive fully formed.

All art is contemporary art because it had to be made when it was now.