Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
In a general sense, to convert any short story, novel, play, or opera into a movie, you have to re-rig it. Even though they're all narratives over time, they're very different forms.
Reading a book is like re-writing it for yourself. You bring to a novel, anything you read, all your experience of the world. You bring your history and you read it in your own terms.
'The Secret Life of Bees' was my first novel, so I had no process. I was flying by the seat of my pants, as they say, trying to understand how I, as a novelist, would work with story.
When I first began to write fiction, I didn't think I was a comic writer; I thought I was a serious writer. I was surprised when the first novel I wrote was regarded as a funny novel.
One of my favorite things is to first read a novel and then see the movie. I enjoy picturing the characters and then later, seeing them on the screen, comparing how they're different.
The impulse of the journalist is to be novel, yet to relate his curiosities to the urgencies of the moment; the philosopher seeks what he conceives to be true, regardless of the moment.
But novels are never about what they are about; that is, there is always deeper, or more general, significance. The author may not be aware of this till she is pretty far along with it.
My first novel, 'Leaving Atlanta,' took at look at my hometown in the late 1970s, when the city was terrorized by a serial murderer that left at least 29 African-American children dead.
If I have any advantage, maybe, as a writer, it is that I don't think I'm very interesting. I mean, beginning a novel with the last sentence is a pretty plodding way to spend your life.
I first became an Alan Moore fan in Covent Garden on a Saturday afternoon in 1987, when I bought a copy of 'Watchmen,' his graphic novel about ageing superheroes and nuclear apocalypse.
In the world of crime novels, the annual Audible Sounds of Crime awards are a pretty big deal, and I was thrilled to be shortlisted for my fifth novel in my bestselling Nic Costa series.
Growing up devouring horror comics and novels, and being inspired to become a writer because of horror novels, movies, and comic books, I always knew I was going to write a horror novel.
Imagine a world in which no writer has written a literary novel in sixty years. Imagine a place where not a single person has read a book that is truly about the character at its center.
The experience of writing 'The Kite Runner' is one I will always think back on with fondness. There is an energy, a romance in writing the first novel that can never be duplicated again.
One of my desert island books, 'The Leopard' is not so much a novel as a eulogy for a way of life and a Sicily that was already lost by the time Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa was writing.
I never, ever decided that I had to write a novel because, to me, there's no such decision that ought to be made. It's only something that I felt compelled to do, and it began to evolve.
Romance and novel paint beauty in colors more charming than nature, and describe a happiness that humans never taste. How deceptive and destructive are those pictures of consummate bliss!
I would like to one day write a nice big novel and enjoy writing it and people enjoy reading it but I cannae be bothered or I don't have any ideas that would fill up a big book like that.
I know many older writers who were very successful and whose books are now out of print, so you have to go to antiquarian booksellers to buy their fifth or eighth novel or whatever it is.
For a Jewish Puritan of the middle class, the novel is serious, the novel is work, the novel is conscientious application why, the novel is practically the retail business all over again.
Romance novels have the power to bring love into the lives of readers. Through the characters, we get to fall in love every time we pick up a romance novel. What could be better than that?
My first novel was called 'Betrayed by F. Scott Fitzgerald,' about the difficulties of graduating from college, the longing and mourning you feel when all your promise seems to float away.
The Butcher Boy is a very great novel indeed and a very important Irish novel. The ambiguity of that is, he's writing a book about an appalling situation and he does it in a hilarious way.
With 'Nostromo', Joseph Conrad said that he had wanted to write a novel about the degradation of an idea. That's what we wanted to show in the case of Dustin Hoffman's character, Bernstein.
There is not one big cosmic meaning for all, there is only the meaning we each give to our life, an individual meaning, an individual plot, like an individual novel, a book for each person.
There are a lot of very good New York novels, but there's no single all-encompassing novel, the way you could look at any number of Dickens books and say we know London as a result of that.
If you decide on a goal - for example, 'I'm going to write a novel' or 'I'm going to run a 10K' - your subconscious will formulate the likelihood of that happening based on past experiences.
There are two phone calls parents don't ever want to get from their children. No. 1 is, 'I'm in prison. Come fetch me.' And No. 2 is, 'I've written a novel... and it's set in your hometown.'
When I first read Margaret Atwood's novel 'The Handmaid's Tale,' it was Saudi Arabia as I knew it that came to mind, not a dystopian future United States as in the new television adaptation.
Adapting a novel is not really about being faithful to every word and every moment the author has created. It's more about that same story being filtered through somebody else's sensibility.
The lust and attraction are often a given in a romance novel - I want to dig into the elements of true friendship that form a foundation for a solid, gonna-last-forever romantic relationship.
Writing a novel is not merely going on a shopping expedition across the border to an unreal land: it is hours and years spent in the factories, the streets, the cathedrals of the imagination.
I belong to the middle class that grew up very influenced by the Catholic church. The people of the novel are from a more pagan and practical world in which the Christianity is just a veneer.
A fact is a simple statement that everyone believes. It is innocent, unless found guilty. A hypothesis is a novel suggestion that no one wants to believe. It is guilty, until found effective.
If you are working in an office, where do you find the time to write a novel? But you can finish a short story in five pages. Furthermore, a short story is a perfect place to learn the craft.
Short-story writing requires an exquisite sense of balance. Novelists, frankly, can get away with more. A novel can have a dull spot or two, because the reader has made a different commitment.
My work is less violent because we tend to write what we want to read... and I'm not that interested in gruesome books. Any violence, to fit in well with a crime novel, has to have compassion.
Stories are hard. I have friends who knock out stories on a weekly or monthly basis, like they're running on medicinal-strength Updike. But for me a story is as daunting a prospect as a novel.
After immersing myself in the mysteries of the Electoral College for a novel I wrote in the '90s, I came away believing that the case for scrapping it is less obvious than I originally thought.
I am writing about people who are alive in the city of New York during mid-20th-century America. And these people are like a character in a play or they are figures in a short story or a novel.
I begin every novel with the vow that I will not write about technology, Catholicism, or Hell. As you know, I end up writing about all three. They just happen to be personal obsessions of mine.
I think escapism is very important, certainly in my life. I love nothing more than escaping into the world of a film or a novel. To be involved in creating that for other people is a privilege.
Ford Maddox Ford's 'The Good Soldier' is my favourite novel. I first read it in the 1950s and have read it about 20 times since. It's possibly the best-constructed book in the English language.
I'm constantly trying to figure out how to crack that mystery; how to make a novel that has a sense of immediacy of a short story. I try to do that and I'll try it again, but I'll never get it.
I wrote a novel about Israelis who live their own lives on the slope of a volcano. Near a volcano one still falls in love, one still gets jealous, one still wants a promotion, one still gossips.
It's been more than a decade since I put that self-published novel, 'Lip Service', up on a website. Since then, many hundreds of authors have gone from self-published to traditionally published.
I usually submit a novel at a certain number of words, and when I've finished working with my editor, the novel is longer than when I submitted it. I need my editor to help me open up the story.
I've never been that person who thought that because I've written one novel, I should write another and another. It's only when there was another novel to write that I was going to write another.
A novel requires a certain kind of world-building and also a certain kind of closure, ultimately. Whereas with a short story you have this sense that there are hinges that the reader doesn't see.
My first novel, 'Housekeeping,' was accepted by the first agent who read it, and bought by the first editor who read it. In general, my experience with publication has been gentle and gratifying.