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Most novels, I find, are three times longer than they need to be. Very little happens, and I don't want to waste my time with them.

I always tell my students, 'If you walk around with your eyes and ears open, you can't possibly live long enough to write all the novels you'll encounter.'

Life resembles a novel more often than novels resemble life.

I have tried very hard as a novelist to say, 'Novels are about individuals and especially larger than life individuals.'

You know what writers say about their long books: If I had another year, the book would be half as long.

Novels, in my experience, are slow in coming, and once I've begun them I know I have years rather than months of work ahead of me.

Actually, the 14 novels were written over a period of just over 6 years.

There comes a point when you're writing a novel when you're in it so deep that the life of the novel becomes more real to you than life itself. You have to write your way out of it; once you're there, it's too late to abandon.

There's no reason you should write any novel quickly.

I'm never doing a long novel again, truly.