I don't get on with novelists, don't enjoy their company. Once you've worked for a publisher, you understand the species, see them in their natural habitat, and it's not always pretty.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
Novelists seem to fall into two distinct categories - those that plan and those that just see where it takes them. I am very much the former category.
Authors are ordinary people who usually start to live apart, in the imagination, because they don't fit in with normal, healthy people.
Novelists are no more moral or certain than anybody else; we are ideologically adrift, and if we are any good then our writing will live in several places at once. That is both our curse and our charm.
When you get inside a literary novel you feel that the author, more often than not, just doesn't know enough about things. They haven't been around enough - novelists never go anywhere. Once I discovered true books about real things - books like 'How To Run a Company' - I stopped reading novels.
I really do believe some people are naturally novelists and some people are short story writers. For me, when I was in middle school or high school, I started with novels.
The interesting thing about fiction from a writer's standpoint is that the characters come to life within you. And yet who are they and where are they? They seem to have as much or more vitality and complexity as the people around you.
I find that nonfiction writers are the likeliest to turn out interesting novels.
There are many reasons why novelists write, but they all have one thing in common - a need to create an alternative world.
God gets the great stories. Novelists must make do with more mundane fictions.
To me, novels are a trip of discovery, and you discover things that you don't know and you assume that many of your readers don't know, and you try to bring them to life on the page.