“I'll never forget reading Chekhov's "A Doctor's Visit" on a train to Hawthorne, New York, and I got to the end - the scene where the patient says goodbye to the doctor and she puts a flower in her hair as a kind of thank you to him - and I felt like a cowboy shot from a canyon's top. This is a different experience from reading a novel, I think. The emotional effect is cumulative. Let's just hope market forces don't send short fiction the way of the dinosaur, because their sales are paltry compared to the novel and this is truly unfortunate.” ThinkingWayKindDifferentEndsReadingForceFeltForgetFictionNovelEffectsNew YorkEmotionalFlowerHairSceneShotsDoctorsTrainPatientGoodbyeNever ForgetUnfortunateCowboySaying GoodbyeDinosaursCanyonsCumulativeDifferent ExperiencesChekhovHawthorne Author:Adam Ross
“I always worry that knowing too much about a novel or a story early on in writing will close it down - it feels fatalistic in some way.” WayFeelsWritingStoriesWorryNovelKnowingToo MuchKnowing Too Much Author:Dan Chaon
“Your characters are always your children. And while you are writing, you're keeping them safe. Now they're ready to go into the world and it's sad. I'm happy with the way the novel came out but all the characters' ending really saddened me.” WorldWayWritingChildrenCharacterNovelReadySafeOur ChildrenYour ChildrenSaddenedReally Sad Author:Yiyun Li
“I was reading Raymond Chandler very much with the feminist eye. In six of his seven novels, it's the woman who presents herself in a sexual way, who is the main bad person. And then you start reading more fiction, whether crime fiction or straight fiction, it's just bad girls trying to make good boys do bad things, going all the way back to Adam and Eve. The woman that thou gavest me made me do it, Adam says to God.” WayTryingPersonsMadeEyeGirlReadingFictionBoysNovelCrimeSixSevenFeministBad ThingsAdamCrime FictionAdam And EveBad GirlGood BoyReading More Author:Sara Paretsky
“I need as much of the business of making a film to be in my own workspace. It really ought to be a bit more like doing a novel, alone, at first. I'm feeling my way.” WayNeedsFirstsFeelingsFilmBitsMy OwnNovelOughtMy WayWorkspace Author:William Monahan
“I have a lot of stuff that I never published because I always had a sense that novels were not finally going to be the way I made my living, because the form was dying commercially.” WayMadeFormStuffNovelDying Author:William Monahan
“With a novel, you have to have a story. It's much more important to have it matter to the reader what happens to people, and it has to make sense and end in a way that is satisfying. So I spend a lot more time thinking about that. Then the writing itself usually is easier for me, because I know where it's going.” PeopleThinkingKnowsWayWritingImportantEndsMatterStoriesHappensNovelReaderEasierMake SenseMore TimeSatisfying Author:Dave Barry
“It's really the story of a young woman, or two women, growing up in Naples in a poor neighborhood. The way that they get out of it - or don't get out of it - that's part of it. But it's also the story of the mid-20th century in Italy so it's really like a social, historical and personal novel. I think that even though I didn't live in Italy in those years, it did cover that same type of generational upbringing that someone like me might've had in America.” ThinkingWayYearsTwoStoriesMightAmericaYoungSocialPoorNovelGrowing UpGrowingCenturyTypeHistoricalLike MeNeighborhoodYoung Women20th CenturyUpbringingNaplesPoor Neighborhoods Author:Ann Goldstein
“Not all coincidence has to be loaded with meaning. Sometimes, things simply recur because that's how it is in life, that's how the mood gets in. It's good to subtly overdo it too, as Nabokov does, as Sebald does. It's a good way to intensify that region of localized weather that we call a novel.” WayDoeSometimesNovelMoodWeatherRegionsCoincidenceGood WayLoaded Author:Teju Cole
“Sometime during the 1990s, when I was teaching philosophy at UCSD, my friend, colleague, and music teacher, Carol Plantamura, discussed the possibility of teaching a course together looking at ways in which various literary works (plays, stories, novels) had been treated as operas, and how different themes emerged in the opera and in its original. One of the pairings we planned to use was Mann's great novella and Britten's opera. Unfortunately, the course was never taught, but the idea remained with me.” WayIdeasDifferentPhilosophyPlayStoriesUseTogetherCoursesNovelTeacherTeachingPossibilityTaughtMy FriendsOriginalsVariousTreatedThemeOperaColleaguesCarolsLiterary WorksMusic TeacherWork Play Author:Philip Kitcher
“I like that we don't have to come out the first 10 minutes and score, you know, with joke, joke, joke. We can open it in a more novel way and keep playing different pranks as we go through the thing.” KnowsWayFirstsDifferentNovelMinutesJokesScorePranks Author:Bruce Vilanch
“Hwang Jung-eun is one of the brightest stars of the new South Korean generation - she's Han Kang's favourite, and the novel we're publishing scooped the prestigious Bookseller's Award, for critically-acclaimed fiction that also has a wide popular appeal. She stands out for her focus on social minorities - her protagonists are slum inhabitants, trans women, orphans - and for the way she melds this hard-edged social critique with obliquely fantastical elements and offbeat dialogue.” WayHardSocialStarsFictionNovelFocusGenerationsElementsSouthWideDialogueAppealsMinoritiesAwardsFavouritePublishingStanding OutCritiqueTransKoreanOrphanProtagonistsSlumsJungPrestigiousBooksellersOffbeatBrightest Star Author:Deborah Smith
“I'm in that very preliminary stage of wondering how exactly to "pressurize" the novel in some way I've never considered before.” WayWonderNovelStage Author:Mark Leyner
“I was once doing a question and answer period with the novelist Jane Smiley in a bookstore and someone asked us what our processes were and Jane said hers and then I said mine and Jane said, "Well, if I had a student like that I'd force him never to write like that again because you could never write a novel in the way that you write poetry."” IfsWayWritingWellsSaidForceProcessAnswersNovelStudentsMinesPeriodsNovelistsJaneBookstoresQuestions And AnswersSmiley Author:Edward Hirsch
“I always find time to read novels and poetry as well as scripts; I like to enjoy different kinds of storytelling. I spend time at the beach and with my loved ones. I like traveling to unfamiliar places to challenge my perspectives and glean wisdom from other ways of life.” WayWellsKindDifferentEnjoyChallengesNovelPerspectiveScriptsStorytellingBeachLoved OnesDifferent KindsEnd TimesSpend TimeUnfamiliar Author:Rose McIver
“I wouldn't have thought that the techniques of story-telling, which is what the novel is after all, can vary much because there are two things involved.There's a story and there's a listener, whose attention you have to keep. Now the only way in which you can keep a reader's attention to a story is in his wanting to know what is going to happen next. This puts a fairly close restriction on the method you must use.” KnowsWayTwoStoriesUseHappensNextAttentionNovelReaderInvolvedMethodTechniqueTwo ThingsListenersRestrictionVary Author:William Golding
“Well, in Angel of Hope, Amber ends up going in her sister's stead. The focus of that book and the next one coming out, Angel of Love, is how she finds her way out of her sister's shadow and into herself. That's really what those two novels are based on.” WayWellsTwoBookEndsNextLove IsNovelFocusAngelShadowComing OutThe Next OneAmber Author:Lurlene McDaniel
“I thought, "If I could bring these characters [Wonder Boys] to life and lead the audience to react the same way I did, this could be a really special picture." Then I read Michael's [Chabon] novel and got even more enthusiastic about it.” IfsWayCharacterWonderBoysNovelAudienceSpecialIf I CouldEnthusiastic Author:Curtis Hanson
“I don't know if you hear this often but I would say The Razor's Edge (loosely based on a great W. Somerset Maugham novel). This was Bill Murray's first dramatic role so everyone thought he stunk in this deep character but I thought he and the movie were great. The movie takes place over decades so you see Murray's character go from goofy playboy all the way to wiser, older person. It's basically a movie version of the journey I described.” IfsKnowsWayFirstsPersonsCharacterRolesNovelJourneyBillsEdgesDecadesVersionsDramaticWiserRazorsPlayboyGoofy Author:Lewis Schiff
“Coca-Cola can get really fresh output because it is getting people who are outside the traditional model and they are combining ideas in very novel ways.” PeopleWayIdeasNovelModelsTraditionalGet RealOutputCombiningCoca Cola Author:John Kao
“There's a long-term tradition of white supremacy in this country. [Donald] Trump isn't something entirely new. But then there is the crisis for white supremacy in this country now where you have people of color standing up for themselves in ways that they've never stood up for themselves or at least standing up for themselves in a generational, novel way.” PeopleWayLongCountryTermWhiteNovelColorTrumpStandingTraditionCrisisLong TermWhite SupremacySupremacyStood Up Author:Junot Diaz
“Wouldn't that be wonderful if I could do that? And that way, I could walk with the muse, rather than walk without her. The novel would write itself.” IfsWayWritingWalksNovelWonderfulIf I CouldMuse Author:Shirley Geok-lin Lim
“I don't think a novel's main donation, main gift, is the document. The document is there, but a novel goes beyond documentation. It goes into opening a new vista, opening a new perspective, showing familiar things in an unfamiliar way, and making the reader reconsider the documentary facts which he or she may have known before.” ThinkingWayMayFactsKnownNovelPerspectiveReaderFamiliarOpeningDocumentsDocumentariesUnfamiliarDonationVistasDocumentationNew PerspectiveFamiliar Things Author:Amos Oz
“There are as many different ways to write a novel as there are varieties of human consciousness, so I am totally delighted if people want to use words that come from genres to describe how this book functions because those words are accurate.” PeopleIfsWayWantWritingHumansBookDifferentUseConsciousnessNovelFunctionVarietyGenreDifferent WaysAccurateDelightedHuman Consciousness Author:Emily Barton
“A novel is a way to rethink and rewrite and re-envision the past, and also a way to speak to people who haven't been born yet about what we think about right now.” PeopleThinkingWayPastSpeakBornNovelHavensRight Now Author:Emily Barton