Anthony Burgess Quotes

I was always at heart a novelist and wanted to tell a bigger story, so I wanted to create people who told other kinds of truths than literal truths.

Various books revolutionised what I think about novels and showed me that they're not strict, formulaic things. 'Coming Through Slaughter' by Michael Ondaatje was one of them.

Only in a novel are all things given full play.

After I finished 'The Darkest Minds' series, I knew I wanted to take a risk and work on something completely different - lighter in tone, with a little bit more romance, and a completely different set of characters - that would also, um, finally justify my liberal arts degree.

I find that in a novel I can get more of life, perhaps not such intense life, but certainly more of life than in poetry.

If writing a novel is a year's exile to a foreign country, writing a short story is a weekend spent somewhere exotic. They're much more like vacations, more exciting and different, and you're off.

Narrative art, the novel, from Murasaki to Proust, has produced great works of poetry.

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

I don't care whether the story is real or fantastical. I tell the story that needs to be told.

Only in novels can we take another human being into our head and create something jointly.

As I continue to write as M. O'Keefe, I find myself following darker story lines. Plots I might have flinched away from I now rush toward. Using sex as a tool to tell women's stories is endlessly fascinating.

Novels are such mysterious and amorphous and tender things.

I am a writer, which means I write stories, I write novels, and I would write poetry if I knew how to. I don't want to limit myself.

Novels give you the opportunity to create a whole world. Because you create people, you make them talk... You decide who they are, whether they live or die. It's the closest thing to feeling like a god that you can come to.

All novels must be autobiographical because I am the only material that I know. All of the characters are me. But at the same time, a novel is never autobiographical even if it describes the life of the author. Literary writing is a completely different medium.

If I had a plot that was all set in advance, why would I want go through the agony of writing the novel? A novel is a kind of exploration and discovery, for me at any rate.

Novel-writing is the only place where someone who would have liked to do anything can still do that vicariously.

The essayist has to follow a certain intellectual pattern. The novelist has the advantage of using fantasy, of being subjective.

'Gone-Away World' was a shotgun blast, an explosion out of the box I'd put myself into writing film scripts. 'Tigerman' is shorter, tighter, more crafted.

I don't do nonfiction anymore. Eventually, you just feel constrained by the facts. You want to go where the words take you, and people's actual lives don't always conform. And you can't know them that well.

I've tried very hard and I've never found any resemblance between the people I know and the people in my novels.

Novels are longer than life.

Writing a novel is easier than writing a memoir; you are not constrained by the truth.

If you are a novelist of a certain type of temperament, then what you really want to do is re-invent the world. God wasn't too bad a novelist, except he was a Realist.

Fiction writing is great. You can make up almost anything.