Dave Eggers Quotes

It's hard to write an Evan Hunter novel because I really am starting from scratch. I'm assuming a new voice each time. The McBain voice is set.

The function of the novelist... is to comment upon life as he sees it.

The whole trick is to make it feel like you're spying on real people's lives as they get through the day. When I'm writing, I have to trick myself as a writer. If I consciously say, 'I'm writing,' I feel all this pressure and somehow it doesn't feel as real as when it doesn't seem to count as much.

At DePauw, I was teaching writing and fiction. The things I wanted to teach, more than anything else, were form and theory of the novel, of narrative. I liked those classes.

The great pleasure for me in writing short stories is the fierce, elegant challenge.

I would like to write a book that wasn't so violent and weird, but I just don't think I can do that with my talent. I don't think it would come off.

I think the short story is a very underrated art form. We know that novels deserve respect.

Short stories are fiction's R & D department, and failed or less-than-conclusive experiments are not just to be expected but to be hoped for.

People who actually tell stories, meaning people who write novels and make feature films, don't see themselves as storytellers.

I do think novels are overlooked. I did write one some years ago that I think is quite good, called 'The End of the Story,' not to blow my own horn.

Anthony Powell taught me to write; he has such brilliant control of the mechanics of the novel.

A novel wouldn't be a book if there weren't some flights of fancy on the part of the author, stopping time to examine things, or to tell a joke.

After working as a journalist I went to a writing program at Johns Hopkins. It was interesting because it was neither journalistic nor historical, but it emphasized writing style, and afterwards I was asked to write my first book.

I like to think of myself as an unmediated novelist - or perhaps a national novelist.

They say that every writer, they write about himself, and I think that to a certain extent that is true. But also we are creators of fiction.

My temperament is not geared to that of a novelist.

As a writer of fiction, I spend my days inventing real lives for make-believe people; what I create can only seem real.

The novel has always been the form that incorporates other forms. For me, it has always been the ultimate medium.

I tell stories. I kind of stumbled on that by trying to combine Jane Austen and magic.

I think all characters are facets of the writer. In a way, they have to be if you're going to write them convincingly.

I have assiduously avoided calling my books novels.

All fiction has to have a certain amount of truth in it to be powerful.

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

Novelists should be like scientists, dissecting the cadaver.

I spend my life writing fiction, so reading fiction isn't much of an escape. That's not always true, but I don't read much contemporary fiction.