I tell you, once a girl's got a dose of novels she's a pushover for iambic pentameter.
A. A. Gill
I deeply respect literature and expect to gain insight from a book and to identify emotionally with its characters. I therefore avoid reading suspense novels or science fiction.
A. B. Yehoshua
I don't think you can tell the objective truth about a person. That's why people write novels.
A. N. Wilson
Iris Murdoch did influence my early novels very much, and influence is never entirely good.
I always say I write my own novels and the characters don't take control of me, but in fact, I look at the characters in the early stages and I think, 'What is he or she like,' and they slowly come together and they become the person they are.
A. S. Byatt
In novels in general - and also on the television - we do live in a world where bodies is what we are. We do not talk about the spirit or the soul, and there is a sense that we no longer talk about beliefs, either Freudian or Marxist.
In England, everyone believes if you think, then you don't feel. But all my novels are about joining together thinking and feeling.
I find the attempt to find things out, which scientists are possessed by, to be as human as breathing, or feeding, or sex. And so the science has to be in the novels as science and not just as metaphors.
In high school, my English teacher Celeste McMenamin introduced me to the great novels and Shakespeare and taught me how to write. Essays, poetry, critical analysis. Writing is a skill that was painful then but a love of mine now.
Aaron Lazar
The L.A Trilogy is a series of three novels starring Ray, a robot detective, and his boss, a computer called Googol. Set in an alternative version of 1960s Los Angeles, each book will be more or less standalone but together will form an overarching story arc with 'Brisk Money' as the origin story.
Adam Christopher
I was definitely more of a movie/cartoon guy than comics, but I really do like graphic novels - I don't have the time to sit down and read Stephen King like I used to, so I find picking up 'Saga' every now and then and just diving back into it is a great way to stay reading.
Adam F. Goldberg
Writing novels is largely about endurance and patience. I take a lot of breaks, hit walls, and go do something else while I think things through. But I do it every day, and I try to treat it as a job, something that is not dictated by whimsy or muses.
Adam Mansbach
Novels are pirated all the time, but it's hard to imagine that you're at work and you open up the attachment that your brother sent you and it's the new Phillip Roth novel.
It wasn't until I hit 20 that I became an obsessive reader, I think, which feels a little funny considering I was a bookseller for five years and have been reviewing YA novels for four years.
Adam Silvera
Sometimes the fantasy writers set their novels in an ancient Earth, sometimes a parallel Earth, or, quite often, they offered no explanation at all as to the temporal and geographic location.
Adrian McKinty
Writing is writing. It's an abiding, wonderful talent, craft, gift that stays with you your whole life. And you can go in different forms, and you can try them. Look at me: I'm writing novels because I found something I love because I tried it.
Adriana Trigiani
I write novels about women, except for one: 'Rococo', about a man, a New Jersey decorator. But even that book had a woman on the cover.
Novels are so much unrulier and more stressful to write. A short story can last two pages and then it's over, and that's kind of a relief. I really like balancing the two.
Aimee Bender
You know, I read graphic novels but not encyclopedically.
Aisha Tyler
Teaching does allow me to keep one foot in the youthful waters I tend to occupy in my novels, so I'm thankful for that. My students also remind me on a daily basis that the stories I collected during my district attorney days are actually interesting to people who haven't had that experience.
Alafair Burke
The best crime novels are all based on people keeping secrets. All lying - you may think a lie is harmless, but you put them all together and there's a calamity.
I've learned to accept the fact that my students are far too busy preparing for their own legal careers to care one bit about the off-campus antics of Professor Burke. I get the impression that my students are vaguely aware of my novels, but are at best mildly curious.
I love novels where not much 'happens' but where the interest is in the ideas and analyses of characters.
I started out when I was 29 - too young to write novels. I was broke. I was on unemployment insurance. I was supposed to be writing a Ph.D. dissertation, so I had a typewriter and a lot of paper.
Spy novels are traditionally about lone wolves, but how many people actually live like that?
I write what I call 'novels of consolation' for people who are bright and sophisticated.
I don't just want my books to be about the '30s and '40s. I want them to read as if they had been written then. I think of them as '40s novels, written in the conservative narrative past.
My novels are about the European reality, not about chases. You want chases, get somebody else's books.
I write about the period 1933-42, and I read books written during those years: books by foreign correspondents of the time, histories of the time written contemporaneously or just afterwards, autobiographies and biographies of people who were there, present-day histories of the period, and novels written during those times.
Let me put it this way: I don't plan to retire. What would I do, become a brain surgeon? I mean, a brain surgeon can retire and write novels, but a novelist can't retire and do brain surgery - or at least he better not.
I chose a time in the century which had the greatest moments for novels - the late '30s and World War II.
I never got any training in how to write novels as an English major at Oberlin, but I got some great training for writing novels from anthropology and from Margaret Mead.
Graham Greene's work must be included in any survey of top-rank spy novels, and 'Our Man in Havana' may be his best.
Novels aren't pedagogical instruments, or instructions in law or physics or any other discipline. A novel has to be an emotional experience, a trip of the imagination, and because science has raised so many issues that concern and affect humans, it's a good starting place for me.
We've had science fiction novels where China is dominant; we've had novels where India is dominant, and I suppose it's all about getting away from that cliched old tired idea that the future belongs to the West.
There are similarities between historical novels and science fiction. Being thrown into the Napoleonic Wars is just as much of a different world as space.
As a kid, I'd buy novels with these magnificent Chris Fosse covers which showed an enormous contraption hovering over a planet, and you'd always think 'Where's that going to come in?' And it never did! It was always slightly disappointing when the contents of a book never lived up to the cover.
It's with bad sentiments that one makes good novels.
I am a writer, which means I write stories, I write novels, and I would write poetry if I knew how to. I don't want to limit myself.
The most distinguishing element of my novels is that I try as hard as I can - within the context of a popular commercial thriller - to make them feel authentic. Drawing on real locations and real events is part of that authenticity.
There's one massive problem with coming from writing novels into screenplays that I've discovered over the years, which is that you've got too much facility on the page.
I take a lot from everywhere. I take from music, architecture, novels, and plays. Anywhere that hits you.
I'm not much of a Rick Moody fan, but I want to be a fan for the Rick Moody I thought might appear after his first two novels, 'Garden State' (1992) and 'The Ice Storm' (1994).
Serial novels have an unexpected effect; they hook the writer as well as the reader.
The novel succeeds on terms exclusive to literature. A good film succeeds on terms exclusive to the cinema. That's why so many bad novels can become good movies, like 'Jaws' or 'The Godfather.'
I've always been interested in those Orwellian dystopian novels, like 'Fahrenheit 451,' 'Brave New World,' and obviously Orwell's '1984.'
I did try to write fiction. I wrote 10 novels. And they were all just awful.
I liked 35 and in both my novels that is the age of the lead characters. I tried making them my age but they just seemed to keep moaning about stuff.
Ezekiel Boone's books, starting with 'The Hatching' series, are meant to be big, sprawling, smart, entertaining books that are fun above all else; the literary novels written under my real name, Alexi Zentner, are certainly a little more quiet.
I never plot out my novels in terms of the tone of the book. Hopefully, once a story is begun it reveals itself.
