“I grew up in a community where it was not the exception to be a good girl. It was sort of expected. And all of my friends were good girls too, and my boyfriends were good boys. Everybody was pretty nice. And that affects how I write my characters. There aren't very many bad guys in my novels.” WritingCharacterGuyGirlCommunityBoysNovelNiceGrewGrew UpMy FriendsExpectedExceptionBad GuysMy BoyfriendGood GirlGood Boy Author:Stephenie Meyer
“I had two projects that fell apart during preproduction. The first one was this movie that Judd Apatow and I had written about two guys following the Rolling Stones. It was going to be half concert film, half pseudo-documentary. It was Mick Jagger's idea.The other one was Simple Plan, based on a novel by Scott Smith. It's a great book - really stark, not a comedy - about a guy who finds $4 million in a plane crash and decides to keep it.” FirstsTwoBookIdeasFilmGuySimpleHalfMillionsNovelComedyPlansWrittenProjectsStonesFollowingPlanesConcertsCrashRollingDocumentariesStarksRolling StonesGreat BookPseudoTwo GuysJaggerPlane CrashesSimple Plan Author:Ben Stiller
“A novel it's different. It's kind of exhilarating not to have to cut to the bone constantly. Oh, well I can go over here for a moment. I can say what I think the guy was thinking or what the day looked like or what the bird was doing. If you do that as a playwright, you're dead.” IfsThinkingWellsKindI CanDifferentMomentsGuyNovelCuttingBirdBonesPlaywrightExhilaratingOh Well Author:David Mamet
“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
“When you're reading a novel, I think the reason you care about how any given plot turns out is that you take it as a data point in the big story of how the world works. Does such-and-such a kind of guy get the girl in the end? Does adultery ever bring happiness? How do winners become winners?” ThinkingWorldKindDoeBookEndsReasonStoriesBigsCareGuyTurnsGirlReadingGivenNovelDataWinnerPlotAdultery Author:Elif Batuman
“The seriousness or otherwise of the subject matter is often irrelevent to the question of whether a book is any good. F Scott Fitzgerald wrote a great and beautiful novel which mainly involved shallow people going to parties in a rich guy's house. By contrast, all sorts of terrible books are published every month about men slaughtering people for no reason - a serious matter which, in itself, does not make the author worthy of serious consideration.” PeopleMenDoeBookMatterReasonBeautifulGuyHouseLanguagePartyNovelRichSubjectsSeriousMonthsInvolvedTerribleWorthyConsiderationNo ReasonContrastShallowSeriousnessSubject MatterScott Fitzgerald Author:Declan Lynch
“As for the military or service professionals, I have nothing but respect for them, but come on, when it comes to romance novels, we all know it's really about the uniforms and how the guys look in them!” KnowsLooksRomanceGuyNovelMilitaryUniformsRomance Novel Author:Jill Shalvis
“a novel is not born of a single idea. The stories I've tried to write from one idea, no matter how terrific an idea, have sputtered out and died by chapter three. For me, novels have invariably come from a complex of ideas that in the beginning seemed to bear no relation to each other, but in the unconscious began mysteriously to merge and grow. Ideas for a novel are like the strong guy lines of a spider web. Without them the silken web cannot be spun.” WritingIdeasMatterStoriesGuyThreeStrongGrowsBornLinesNovelBearsRelationDiedComplexesUnconsciousChaptersSpidersTerrificSpunSpider Web Author:Katherine Paterson
“Playing Destroyo, who was sort of a 'Silence Of The Lambs' type character, I'd say I was wearing about 50 pounds of rubber and foam rubber and makeup. But I had no idea who The Tick was. I'm not a big graphic-novel guy. I don't even know if 'The Tick' was a graphic novel!” IfsKnowsIdeasCharacterBigsGuySilenceNovelTypeNo IdeaMakeupPoundsGraphicLambsRubberTickFoamGraphic Novels Author:Kurt Fuller
“Guy Gavriel Kays Tigana is, in my opinion, one of the best, if not the best fantasy novel ever written. Its beautifully written, the characters are unforgettable, the worldbuilding is exquisite.” IfsCharacterGuyOpinionFantasyNovelWrittenExquisiteUnforgettableFantasy Novels Author:David B. Coe
“Before my first novel, I was dating a woman who later went to prison for bashing a guy with a hammer.” FirstsGuyNovelDatingPrisonHammers Author:Gary Shteyngart
“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
“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
“Certainly some guy eating cardboard in Cincinnati has lost any ordinary impetus to review your novel decently if he's just read you just got six figures out of Warner Bros - which incidentally was not true.” IfsGuyLostNovelFiguresSixEatingOrdinaryReviewsImpetusBrosWarner Bros Author:William Monahan
“I sometimes think if I had gone to Oxford or Cambridge and looked like a handsome young guy who could be in an Evelyn Waugh novel or something, I'd be a massive movie star. But there's a longevity to what I do. It's more reliable. Someone isn't deciding that I'm the next big thing.” IfsThinkingSometimesBigsYoungGuyNextStarsNovelGoneMassiveLongevityHandsomeBig ThingsMovie StarOxfordCambridgeYoung Guys Author:Eddie Marsan
“When I'm there, it's pure silence. There are other writers there, too, and I get super competitive. I have this weird fear that some guy next to me is writing this amazing novel, so I got to compete.” WritingGuyNextSilenceNovelPure Author:Matt de la Pena
“I read graphic novels, here and there, but I'm not a comic book guy, as much.” BookGuyNovelComicComic BookHere And ThereGraphicGraphic NovelsComic Book Guy Author:Zachary Levi
“I was always an album guy, not a greatest hits kind of guy, not so much a radio guy. I'm not saying one is better than the other but... It was like reading a novel but shorter than that. You go into a world for an hour and you absorb yourself into it rather than just passively listening and flipping through this and that.” WorldKindGuyReadingHoursNovelListeningRadioAlbums Author:Mark Stoermer