“The apocalypse is coming, that's the one thing I like about George Bush, I really think he can get us into the ... apocalypse, like the BIBLICAL ... I really think he believes that he'll be the guy in the white hat. I think he's read the Stephen King novel The Stand a couple times, and he really thinks there's a dark man in the desert somewhere and he's gonna fight him or something.” ThinkingMenBelieveGuyFightingDarkWhiteNovelOne ThingCoupleKingsDesertHatsBiblicalApocalypse Author:Patton Oswalt
“Writing, and especially writing a novel, where you get to sit in a room by yourself with either a pen and a paper or a computer for a couple of years, is a very solitary occupation. You can read sales figures - a hundred thousand books sold, half a million books sold - but they are just numbers.” WritingYearsBookRoomsNumbersHalfMillionsNovelFiguresCoupleThousandPaperComputerHundredPensOccupationSolitary Author:Neil Gaiman
“Scrivener is where I live. I'm planning the next novel, two screenplays and a couple of short stories with it and it's amazing how fluid the software makes the process. I genuinely think this is the biggest software advance for writers since the word processor.” ThinkingTwoStoriesNextProcessNovelCouplePlanningSoftwareShort StoryFluidScreenplaysProcessors Author:Michael Marshall Smith
“Mr. Robinson and Mr. Kovite have...written a captivating coming-of-age novel that is, by turns, funny and sad and elegiac -\-\ a novel that leaves us with some revealing snapshots of America, both at war and in denial, and some telling portraits of a couple of millennials trying to grope their way toward adulthood.” WayTryingWarAgeAmericaTurnsNovelWrittenCoupleDenialComing Of AgeAdulthoodPortraitsRevealingMillennialsSnapshotsCaptivating Author:Michiko Kakutani
“I think being an editor really helped me take other people's notes on my writing. I'd get a note like 'It's too wet' or 'The first couple chapters are good, but then the rest of the pages were so wet that they were completely illegible' or 'Did you dip this in Sprite? This smells like Sprite. Why would you dip your novel in Sprite?' And instead of pushing back, I'd listen. That's an incredibly important skill for a young writer to have.” PeopleThinkingWritingFirstsImportantYoungNovelCoupleSkillsPagesNotesSmellPushingEditorsWetChaptersDipYoung WritersPushing Back Author:Toni Morrison
“With a song, it only takes a couple of minutes to go back to the beginning and try it again to see if it works. The novel freaks me out because, what if you get into the eighth chapter and think, 'Let's go to the top and see if this works again? It's going to take me three weeks.' I'm in awe of that.” IfsThinkingWritingTryingSongThreeNovelWeekMinutesCoupleAweWhat IfSongwritingTake MeFreakChapters Author:Ben Folds
“In a novella, a whole lot of crap can happen, and you can build momentum and suspense and leave room for a surprise or three. Stories are cut down to the most essential elements, and novels (this might be an unfair generalization on my part) are big fat clumsy efforts where the reader can snooze for a couple chapters and miss nothing of consequence. Hence my love for the middle way.” WayWholeStoriesBigsMightHappensThreeRoomsEffortNovelCuttingMiddleMissingReaderCoupleEssentialsElementsConsequenceSurpriseFatsSuspenseChaptersUnfairCrapMomentumClumsyGeneralizationMiddle Way Author:Robert Reed
“But I'm not a small-literary-novel kind of guy, and once I'd developed the world in the first couple of hundred pages, I felt that there was potential here to go on and write an engaging story set in that world. So that's what I did. This probably ruins things both for the people who want small literary novels and for those who want action-packed epics, but anyway, it's what I wrote.” PeopleWorldWantWritingFirstsKindStoriesActionGuyFeltNovelGoes OnCouplePagesHundredRuinsEpicEngaging Author:Neal Stephenson
“Few real people appear in my two novels, actually. "Ari" appears on the edge of this book a couple of times - but on the edge, she's never in it, even if she's a determining force from the outside. Everybody in the first book was basically made up, if never from scratch.” PeopleIfsFirstsMadeTwoBookRealForceNovelCoupleEdgesScratches Author:Ben Lerner
“Yeah, I'd say there's probably about a couple of hundred people I admire - but that has nothing to do with what a person does themselves. That's why I never mention these things. You can read a detective novel you really like, but it had no bearing on what you do yourself, you just think, "God, how this guy wove this together!" Or you get into the energy of it. Or you see a poem which makes a great statement about sentiment, but it's not sentimental.” PeopleThinkingPersonsDoeTogetherGuyEnergyNovelCoupleHundredYeahStatementsAdmireSentimentsSentimentalThis GuyDetectives Author:Tom Verlaine
“It's very hard to be a screenwriter. I remember getting a couple of awards. I got a PEN West award a million years ago when I did Running on Empty, and I sat in the room with all these writers. They wrote everything from novels to non-fiction to children's books to journalism - any kind of writing - and I realized that there was no one in the room who would ever read anything I'd written.” WritingYearsKindChildrenBookHardRunningRememberRoomsFictionMillionsNovelWrittenCoupleYears AgoEmptyWestI RealizedJournalismSatPensAwardsNon FictionScreenwritersChildren's Books Author:Naomi Foner Gyllenhaal
“I like movies. I've written screenplays as a sort of procrastination thing for me. Like I'll work for a couple months on this idea that's been kicking around and then like 30 pages in I'll just go try a novel because it's a lot easier. That's what I know. So why am I killing myself?” KnowsTryingIdeasNovelWrittenMonthsCoupleEasierPagesKillingProcrastinationScreenplaysKickingKilling Myself Author:Colson Whitehead
“I'm trying to break myself of that habit [of not writing out a first draft ] because I'm working on a couple novels and I know if I tried to write those books the way I wrote the stories it would take me years to finish.” IfsKnowsWayWritingTryingYearsFirstsBookStoriesBreakNovelCoupleHabitTake Me Author:Donald Ray Pollock
“In a couple of Ahdaf Soueif's novels, she gets at the certain kind of English that's being spoken by Egyptians. It's a beautiful, expressive English but it is non-standard, "broken" English that happens to be efficient, eloquent, and communicates perfectly well even if it is breaking rules.” IfsWellsKindHappensBeautifulCertainNovelBrokenCoupleStandardsCommunicateEfficientEloquentExpressiveBreaking RulesBroken English Author:Elliott Colla
“Even though novels were the love of my life, I started off writing poetry. I think because I had a knack for image and lyricism, even though I didn't really have anything to write about, or I didn't know what to write about. I could just couple words together that pleased me and so poetry seemed sort of natural.” ThinkingKnowsWritingTogetherNaturalNovelCoupleKnackWriting PoetryLove Of My Life Author:Melissa Febos
“At the emergence of the modern novel with Rabelais and Cervantes, all kinds of things were possible in a long-form prose work. Within a couple of hundred years, most of those possibilities were abandoned in favor of a text that efficiently transmitted sentiments.” YearsKindLongFormNovelModernPossibilityCoupleHundredFavorsAll KindsProseSentimentsAbandonedEmergenceModern Novel Author:Teju Cole
“I try not to write more than two or three, I try to just write one if possible, I write till the end at least a draft of a play or a novel; but sometimes, I'll take a break for a couple weeks for a project that is paying me money like a television project which I try to stay away from just to stay financially ahead of the game.” IfsWritingTryingTwoEndsSometimesPlayThreeGamesBreakNovelWeekTelevisionCoupleProjectsTill The EndAhead Of The Game Author:Adam Rapp
“I've been drawing since I could hold a pencil. I've got many ideas that are still to be drawn out, but the couple collaborations in development are with other actor/writers for graphic novel/comic that could potentially become a film project.” StillsIdeasFilmActorsNovelDevelopmentCoupleProjectsDrawingComicCollaborationPencilsGraphicGraphic Novels Author:Jade Hassoune
“When I was fifteen I wrote seven hundred pages of an incredibly bad novel - it's a very funny book I still like a lot. Then, when I was nineteen I wrote a couple hundred pages of another novel, which wasn't very good either. I was still determined to be a writer. And since I was a writer, and here I was twenty-nine years old and I wasn't a very good poet and I wasn't a very good novelist, I thought I would try writing a play, which seems to have worked out a little better.” WritingTryingYearsLittlesStillsBookPlaySeemsNovelPoetCouplePagesHundredTwentiesSevenVery GoodDeterminedNineNovelistsFifteenNine YearsNineteenFunny Book Book:Conversations with Edward Albee Source: Conversations with Edward Albee