Every once in a while I feel the tremendous force of the novel. But it does not stay with me.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
I love the novel because it's like a love affair. You can just fall into it and keep going, and you never know where it's going to take you.
Fiction works when it makes a reader feel something strongly.
I don't think with any book you get used to people falling in love with the story. It's been incredible just to realize your books are being read. It's a pretty amazing feeling.
I no longer feel attracted to the well-made novel. I want to write the story that will zero in and give you intense, but not connected, moments of experience. I guess that's the way I see life. People remake themselves bit by bit and do things they don't understand.
The best fiction stays with you and changes you.
It's a great thing when you feel that you recognize yourself, deeply and movingly, in a work of literature.
The novel moves like all the arts. It's transforming itself all the time.
I will write another book if I feel like it.
Good fiction makes me turn off all the other parts of my brain, so that I become quiet and submissive, entirely at the mercy of the work at hand.
I'm never doing a long novel again, truly.