William Golding Quotes

In a book, you can kind of take time and have lulls in places.

I think of novels as houses. You live in them over the course of a long period, both as a reader and as a writer.

I find that short stories are almost like palate cleansers or brain cleansers.

I think that every book that's in a bookstore should entertain in some way.

A novel, at least for me, cannot be visualized at one time.

I began to ask two questions while I was reading a book that excited me: not only what was going to happen next, but how is this done? How is it that these words on the page make me feel the way I'm feeling? This is the line of inquiry that I think happens in a child's mind, without him even knowing he has aspirations as a writer.

I would like to write a book that wasn't so violent and weird, but I just don't think I can do that with my talent. I don't think it would come off.

Stephen King has inspired me with his humor and honesty, and his admonition that the author's job is to tell the truth.

All novels attempt to cut neural routes through the brain, to convince us that down this road the true future of the novel lies.

Short stories are fiction's R & D department, and failed or less-than-conclusive experiments are not just to be expected but to be hoped for.

People really want to think that these things really happened. I don't know why that important, but I know that when I finish reading a novel or something, I want to know how much of that really happened to this author.

The novels take longer to write than the picture book texts, and they do take a different sort of concentration. However, a very short, simple story that works well is just as exciting to me as any longer and more complex book.

Novelists have always had complete freedom to pretty much tell their story any way they saw fit. And that's what I'm trying to do.

Successful fiction does not need to be validated by 'real life'; I cringe whenever a writer is asked how much of a novel is 'real'.

I wrote a novel. It's called 'The Middlesteins.' It's fiction. It's not a memoir. I'm not a spokesperson.

It means that no matter what you write, be it a biography, an autobiography, a detective novel, or a conversation on the street, it all becomes fiction as soon as you write it down.

I tell stories. I kind of stumbled on that by trying to combine Jane Austen and magic.

If you want to write serious books, you must be ready to break the forms.

In TV writing, I felt like Gulliver being tied down by the Lilliputians. There's so much more freedom in fiction writing.

Despite its challenges, the novel offers an opportunity to live in one story for years of your imaginative life. There's a tremendous richness to that.

When I went to university in Colorado, I was encouraged to write very innovative, experimental things, and some of the short stories in 'Bearded Ladies' are a little bit experimental.

I don't read much nonfiction because the nonfiction I do read always seems to be so badly written. What I enjoy about fiction - the great gift of fiction - is that it gives language an opportunity to happen.

'Sag Harbor' was a very different book for me. It changed the way I thought about books that I wanted to do.

As much as I really like the screenwriting thing, the novel is where the author has so much control.

I actually don't know much about Jaclyn Moriarty's process or where her stories come from or who inspired her characters. I just know that reading her books feels like sitting with friends. Her characters feel alive.