Lynn Coady Quotes

The novel, for me, was an accident. I really don't consider myself a novelist.

To sing a song is quite different than to write a poem. I'm not and never will be a novelist, but to write a novel is not the same thing as writing a play. There is a difference in form, but essentially what you're after is the same thing.

It's really hard to be a story writer - no matter how much acclaim you get - and not write a novel.

I thought that I wasn't an essayist because I just didn't see myself in a lot of the essays that were popular at the time. That's why I joined the poetry program in grad school.

I feel like my brain is more geared towards a novel than it is to a movie.

If there is an audience out there for me, I want them to be surprised when the next book comes out.

I write novellas because I don't like loose sprawling prose.

I want prose fiction to be recognized as that, and I'm not interested in writing as it becomes more personal.

When I began to write seriously, 40 years ago now, my chosen form was the novel.

Why should a novelist not also be a historian? To force unnatural divisions within the English language is to work against its capacious and accommodating nature. To expect a writer to produce only novels, or only histories, is equivalent to demanding from a composer that he or she write only string quartets or piano sonatas.

I am a better novelist than a poet, playwright, or essayist.

I love to read. And right now I'm on my last hundred pages of 'The Corrections' by Jonathan Franzen, and I really enjoyed it. His writing is just - he's one of those writers where you just go, 'There are people just meant to be novel writers.'

My poems tend to be more celebratory and lyrical, and the novels so far pretty dark. Poetry doesn't seem to me to be an appropriate tool for exploring that.

If you like the precision and concision of poetry, a page of prose is unsatisfying in a certain way. And poetry is so direct.

My temperament is not geared to that of a novelist.

It's perceived as an accolade to be published as a 'literary' writer, but, actually, it's pompous and it's fake. Literary fiction is often nothing more than a genre in itself.

The novel is not so much a literary genre, but a literary space, like a sea that is filled by many rivers.

I tend to be more of a novel writer. In fact, some of my novels started out as short stories, and I just got carried away! I think some of my best writing is in the short story form, but novels come more naturally to me.

In effect I am not a novelist, but rather a failed essayist who started to write novels because he didn't know how to write essays.

A few people have tried to make me see that my writing isn't quite their thing by saying to me: 'What about realism?' To which my general response is, 'What about it?' However, I wouldn't be at all surprised if one of my favorite writers, Marilynne Robinson, was to say something similar if asked 'What about the fantastic?'

I had reached a point in my career in which I was ready to try something new in my writing, and the idea of a novel has always been in the back of my mind.

What does Sinclair know about anything? He's just a writer.

I've never been a true fan of the short story and have only published a single example of my own.

I can't stand the short story form, which, after all, is a magazine form.

In my mind, there's not a great difference between what people call fiction and non-fiction. So in that sense, I'm like an early-18th-century person. I actually believe there's one way of writing.