Amy Waldman Quotes

The trick to being a novelist is to act like an iceberg. Make it seem as if you're displaying only one-tenth of what you know, and the other nine-tenths isn't visible and never mind if that part is pure styrofoam!

The heart and soul of good writing is research; you should write not what you know but what you can find out about.

In my experience, a novel is the culmination of various thoughts and impressions collected over time, until something comes along to give them a shape, to turn them into a story.

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

Freedom to tell any story I want, with all the imaginary tools of my trade, is why I love writing novels. I love taking an idea, fleshing it out into a new world - and going on adventures with characters who day-dream themselves into existence and take on lives of their own.

Since I don't outline my books very much, I feel like sometimes I don't have a choice in what the characters do; they just kind of take over sometimes.

Sometimes you can publish a first novel in a kind of lyrical flourish, but it is not really a lyrical form. The beautiful truths about the world are more hard won than that. Novels should be bleach boned. It's a question of cumulative observation and lived suffering. It takes time.

I'm a competent novelist. I'm getting better. But I'm a really good short story writer.

In the novels I most admire, there is this sense that, within the confines of the world, the possibilities are always opening in new and surprising ways - that was a quality I strived to capture, with the hope that the reader would be willing to follow me.

It feels like when novelists say they find their characters are doing things they never thought they'd do, the material comes alive, and that's how I feel making music.

One of the most fun things for me, as a writer, is when readers ask questions like, 'Oh, I noticed that you have a lot of water and baptism imagery in your book. Did you do that on purpose?'

A novel usually begins, in my experience, with a thought or image that won't leave me alone.

A novel is 400 pages; it's an endurance race. There's no artist, so I have to describe everything. It's all prose. Whereas with comics, I can rely on the artist. It's really wonderful to have that collaboration and to not always feel the burden of describing everything myself and also just to have someone who can paint the world.

What I like about writing novels is that I'm in my own world for nine months.

You know that thing people say, 'poetry is the hardest, stories are the second hardest, novels are the easiest?' I'm here to tell you that novels are the hardest. Writing a novel is unbelievably difficult. It's nightmarish.

I'm becoming more of a novelist as I get older. The novel just seems the truer form. There's less artifice involved.

In the early Seventies, I started writing a little autobiographical novel about my childhood - I made it into a mystery story.

To make 'Sound of My Voice,' we had to conceive the entire world and understand it holistically. If you want to show less in a movie, you've got to figure out more.

I wanted to write a novel where the meaning is in the story and characters and the subliminal, in the shades and nuances. It's exciting to develop that as a writer.

I always wanted to write novels, even before I had read a lot of novels or had a very good idea of what they were.

When you write your first book, you're writing in a vacuum; it doesn't matter how much time it takes. And then with the second book, you're on contract, and you have deadlines, and it's a little bit tougher. And also the expectations. You don't want to let your characters down.

I think the media's responsibility is to get to the bottom of things - to get to the truth.

I get a lot of energy from making things up, which is why I feel I'm a novelist.

Research is the historical novelist's map, constraint, and purest energy.

Novels often thin themselves out to a watery hue - some even start that way - and at times seem to only ride along the surface of things, giving us what we already know, reporting the news that is just news.