Ma Jian Quotes

I used to read Gore Vidal books and think I was cool.

Writing takes a lot of patience. It usually takes me a year to write a book. One time, it took me 14 years to write a book, not that I worked on it every day.

My first novel, 'Sacrifice,' was set on the Shetland Islands.

I am in the interesting position of being sometimes skimmed by the critics and called literature and sometimes called historical fiction.

The real writer is one who really writes. Talent is an invention like phlogiston after the fact of fire. Work is its own cure. You have to like it better than being loved.

I am also working on a couple of short stories for anthologies. This is new to me and I'm enjoying it.

Novels, in my experience, are slow in coming, and once I've begun them I know I have years rather than months of work ahead of me.

My novels are about the European reality, not about chases. You want chases, get somebody else's books.

I rewrote the ending to 'Farewell to Arms,' the last page of it, thirty-nine times before I was satisfied.

My first two novels were set in the past, and that freed me up in a lot of ways; it allowed me to find my way into my story and my characters through research.

A good novel is a good novel, pointe finale. And I think what I'm writing is exactly that.

I wrote 'The Kiss' 12 hours a day for six months.

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

Real novelists, those we admire, those we consider timeless in their language and character and scene, those who receive accolades for inventive language and form, have writing lives we imagine in specific ways.

I sat down to try to write 'Edinburgh,' an autobiographical novel, and that took five years to write and two years to sell.

I've had great writing teachers and mentors and great success with my first book.

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

It may be time for serious literary novelists to take back some of the subject matter we abandoned to hack novelists and the movies.

I'd done occasional short stories, but I don't like publishing them in literary magazines; they treat you too much like college boys.

I absolutely wasn't going to write a book if it was just going to be about punk.

When I was 19, I wrote a novel, which was not very good, but I finished it.

I used my NEA fellowship to write my novel, 'In Country,' which was published by Harper & Row in 1985.

If getting a contract was relatively straightforward, writing fiction was far harder than I could have imagined, and there were moments during the long and torturous edit process when it seemed that 'Zulu Hart,' the first of the trilogy, would never be fit for public consumption.

As a teenager, I read a lot of science-fiction, but then I read 'Catch-22' and 'The Catcher in the Rye' and started reading more literary fiction.

I was reading some Raymond Carver. I really liked how he did that 'slice of life' thing. Because I'm not much of a reader I end up finding out about these things a long time after other people.