“Novels take me a long time; short fiction provides a kind of immediate gratification—the relationship of sketches to battle paintings.”
Donald Barthelme
more infosource: Interview with Larry McCaffery (1980), in Not-Knowing: The Essays and Interviews (New York: Random House, 1997), 261.
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category: creative process, fiction, novel, writing
medium: Interview
“Have you ever read the novels of Anthony Trollope? They precisely suit my taste,—solid and substantial, written on the strength of beef and through the inspiration of ale, and just as real as if some giant had hewn a great lump out of the earth and put it under a glass case, with all its inhabitants going about their daily business, and not suspecting that they were being made a show of.”
Anthony Trollope
more infosource: Autobiography of Anthony Trollope (New York: Dodd, Mead & Company, 1905), 126.
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category: Anthony Trollope, book, novel, reading
medium:
via: Sarah Kershaw“Poetry is an art of beginnings and ends. You want middles, read novels. You want happy endings, read cookbooks.”
Dean Young
more infosource: The Art of Recklessness: Poetry as Assertive Force and Contradiction (Minneapolis, MN: Graywolf Press, 2010), 86.
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category: cookbook, novel, poetry, reading
medium: Literary Criticism
“THE HAIR OF HAROLD ROUX his notebook says to him. But that is only a title. The rest of his creation fades back across a long plain into mist and darkness. He has always thought of a novel, before it has taken on its first, tentative structure, as a scene on this dark plain, the characters standing around a small fire which warmly etches the edges of their faces. Distant mountains are turning moon-cold and blue as the last light fades as if forever. It is that small fire he must constantly re-create or these last warm lives will cease to live, will never have lived even to fear the immensities of coldness and indifference around them.”
Thomas Williams
more infosource: The Hair of Harold Roux: A Novel (New York: Bloomsbury, 2011), 10–11.
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category: creative process, fire, novel, writing
medium: Fiction
“A good book of letters beats an almost-good novel any day.”
Dwight Garner
more infosource: “Friends Who Didn’t Mince Words,” The New York Times, December 9, 2010.
category: book review, letter, novel
medium: book review
“Writing nonfiction is more like sculpture, a matter of shaping the research into the finished thing. Novels are like paintings, specifically watercolors. Every stroke you put down you have to go with. Of course you can rewrite, but the original strokes are still therein the texture of the thing.”
Joan Didion
more infosource: The Paris Review Interviews, vol. I (New York: Picador, 2006), 476.
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category: creativity, nonfiction, novel, painting, research, sculpture, texture, watercolor, writing
medium: interview
notes: Originally published in Issue 176 of The Paris Review, 2006.
“Each book I’ve written has started off with what I’d call a buzz in the head. A certain kind of music or rhythm, a tone. Most of the effort involved in writing a novel for me is trying to remain faithful to that buzz, that rhythm. It’s a highly intuitive business. You can’t justify it or defend it rationally, but you know when you’ve struck a wrong note, and you’re usually pretty certain when you’ve hit the right one.”
Paul Auster
more infosource: The Paris Review Interviews, vol. IV (New York: Picador, 2009), 328–39.
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category: creative process, intuition, novel, writer, writing
medium: interview
notes: Originally published in Issue 167 of The Paris Review, 2003.
“I think that novels that leave out technology misrepresent life as badly as Victorians misrepresented life by leaving out sex.”
Kurt Vonnegut
more infosource: A Man Without a Country (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2005), 17.
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category: literature, novel, sex, technology, Victorian
medium: nonfiction
novel