novelist

Sometimes I don't even know why I'm writing what I'm writing...I'm just following these people around and taking notes.

I realised early on that being an author is a hugely misunderstood job.

I remember calling the council's cemetery department to ask about body decomposition in different soil types. Once they had verified that I was a novelist and not a sicko, they were extremely helpful.

It is possible to be a great novelist - that is, to render a veracious account of your times - and a bad writer - that is, an incompetent practitioner of applied linguistics.

A friend worth knowing tolerates your flaws while a friend worth keeping loves you in spite of them.

The real novelist, the perfectly simple human being, could go on, indefinitely imaging.

You do not learn how to write novels in a writing program. You learn how by leading an interesting life. Open yourself up to all experience. Let life pour through you the way light pours through leaves.

For a novelist, the gaps in a story are as intriguing as material that still exists.

These poems are cupsthat I pour my love into.Here, Drink!

The novelist is required to create the illusion of a whole world with believable people in it, and the chief difference between the novelist who is an orthodox Christian and the novelist who is merely a naturalist is that the Christian novelist lives in a larger universe. He believes that the natural world contains the supernatural. And this doesn't mean that his obligation to portray the natural is less; it means it is greater.

On Twitter, people who had read my book followed me and I could see what else they were reading, why they'd liked what I'd written and by the by, more about them than I'd ever elicit from two minutes in a tent at a book festival, stuck behind a signing desk.

A novelist's characters must be with him as he lies down to sleep, and as he wakes from his dreams. He must learn to hate them and to love them.

You sound so miserable.___ll novelists are.