Italo Calvino Quotes

The MFA program did one great thing for me: It taught me how to be a better reader and critic. Nothing I wrote during my time at Columbia remains - but learning how to really deconstruct a work of fiction - that, of course, is a permanent part of me now.

Not everyone realises that to write a really good piece of journalism is at least as demanding intellectually as the achievement of any scholar.

Fiction writing and journalism, in my experience, are really excellent training grounds for each other.

See, I have no journalism in my background, so I wasn't practised at research or writing non-fiction, nor at handling the truth in a journalistic way. Journalists know when to call a halt and write something, but I kept on looking for answers.

I'm writing another novel and I know what I'm going to do after, which may be something more like this again, maybe some strange mixture of fiction and non-fiction.

I've been writing for a long time. I sat down to write my first novel in the middle of March of 1982.

Of course, all writers draw upon their personal experiences in describing day-to-day life and human relationships, but I tend to keep my own experiences largely separate from my stories.

It takes me a very, very long time to write a story, to write a piece of fiction, whatever you call the fiction that I write. I just go about it blindly, feeling my way towards what it has to be.

With a novel, no matter where I am in it, I'm fretting about it. Every time I write a book, it starts with great forward momentum. Then there seems to be a period where it slows down a bit, and other things intervene. Then I gain momentum.

I think the most important lesson isn't necessarily to try and write a different book every time, or to try and brand yourself and write one specific kind of book, but to write the kind of books you love to read.

I tend to research as I write so that the narrative can take priority, which is important for a piece of fiction, I think, finding out facts as and when I need to.

All my books are made up of other books. They're all deeply structured on other fiction, because I was a student in fiction and I didn't have much actual living to draw on. I suspect a lot of other people's novels are like that, too, though they might be slower to talk about it.

I've got a particular way of writing novels, and that carries over into the way I write comics and games, too. I'm a news journalist by background, so I approach everything as reporting - I treat it as real, I ask the questions I'd ask in a real situation, and I let the characters speak for themselves.

What I couldn't help noticing was that I learned more about the novel in a morning by trying to write a page of one than I'd learned in seven years or so of trying to write criticism.

You have to be practical. So every time I say, if you want to write a novel you have to be practical, people get bored. They are disappointed. They are expecting a more dynamic, creative, artistic thing to say. What I want to say is: you have to be practical.

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.

Only a reader can become a writer. Develop a lively intellect and the ability to become interested in anything, no matter how mundane it might seem at first. Look for the story. Develop an eye for detail. Feed your mind and your brain: learn as much as you can about everything you can.

Novel writing should never be confused with journalism. Unfortunately, in the case of Primary Colors, a fair number of journalists confused.

Fact-checking is so boring compared to writing fiction.

I had been writing fiction since I was in eighth grade, because I loved it.

Whereas fiction is a continual discovery of what one wants to say, what one feels, what one means, and is, in that sense, a performance art, biography requires different skills - research and organization.

But at the same time, I have trouble keeping things out of books, which is why I don't write short stories because they turn into novels.

I am a writer and editor with a passion for true storytelling. To me, science matters, research matters and knowledge matters, whatever the field.

I'd been writing fiction for 50 years, since I was 19. And when you write fiction, it becomes a way of thinking: there's always a novel around. The strange thing was that after 'Remember Me,' there wasn't.

I never start out with any kind of connecting theme or plan. Everything just falls the way it falls. I don't ever think about what kind of fiction I write or what I am writing about or what I am trying to write about. When I'm writing, what I do is I think about a story that I want to tell.