Quotes on Novel Writing

The central problem of novel-writing is causality.

Novel-writing can be a cold-blooded business. One uses whatever happens to be lying around in memory and employs it to suit one’s end….Then, again, during the months whilst one is writing about the past, a story is colored by what presently is happening to its writer. So, imperceptibly, the tone of voice changes, original intentions slip away. And I found myself looking through another window at a darker landscape inhabited by neither the present nor the past.

A good novel tells us the truth about its hero; but a bad novel tells us the truth about its author.

I'm a failed poet. Maybe every novelist wants to write poetry first, finds he can't, and then tries the short story, which is the most demanding form after poetry. And, failing at that, only then does he take up novel writing.

I love deadlines. I like the whooshing noise they make as they go by.

I try to create sympathy for my characters, then turn the monsters loose.

A poet can survive everything but a misprint.

I am irritated by my own writing. I am like a violinist whose ear is true, but whose fingers refuse to reproduce precisely the sound he hears within.

If you don't have the time to read, you don't have the time or the tools to write.

There's many a bestseller that could have been prevented by a good teacher.

Everybody walks past a thousand story ideas every day. The good writers are the ones who see five or six of them. Most people don't see any.

If you write one story, it may be bad; if you write a hundred, you have the odds in your favor.

Writing is like driving at night in the fog. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.

There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.

My own experience is that once a story has been written, one has to cross out the beginning and the end. It is there that we authors do most of our lying.

There isn't, even now, a great tradition of novel-writing in Afghanistan. Most of the literature is in the form of poetry.

It's none of their business that you have to learn how to write. Let them think you were born that way.