David Shields Quotes

Writing a novel that crosses genres is a risk, but one well worth taking.

What I'm definitely against is the plodding, paint-by-numbers 19th-century-style novel that's still being written today. I just don't understand why you'd read or write that in 2011.

Since I grew up, I have never deliberately used any technique at all other than the physical shaping of my tale so that it more or less resembles what has been thought of as a novel for these last two hundred years.

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

Writing novels is where I'm most comfortable. It's a very intimate experience.

My poems tend to be more celebratory and lyrical, and the novels so far pretty dark. Poetry doesn't seem to me to be an appropriate tool for exploring that.

I'm not nearly smart enough or imaginative enough to tackle the novel form. Never happen.

It means that no matter what you write, be it a biography, an autobiography, a detective novel, or a conversation on the street, it all becomes fiction as soon as you write it down.

I do have the sense that, although there may be no one way to write a novel, there are many novelists who are in fact part of some sort of larger literary community, whether in the form of a writing group or an MFA program, to name two of the more common forms.

I had reached a point in my career in which I was ready to try something new in my writing, and the idea of a novel has always been in the back of my mind.

I come from a prose background. I come from short story background, and that led me into novels.

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.

And you can tell the writers who do it - Robert Stone, for example, who with each new novel is doing something new. I appreciate that in other writers.

What I like to write about is stuff I know. I don't think I could write a novel. I don't think I have it in me to come up with those kinds of characters.

I love working with genre. And to me, the Victorian novel is the flourishing ancestor I'm always trying to access when I write.

There are always interesting, innovative, dynamic stories being written and being published. They're not always being prominently published, but they're being published.

I cannot write a novel because I cannot work in continuity. My works are more abstract, may be, I will try short story writing.

I'm one of those writers who started off writing novels and came to writing short stories later, partly because I didn't have the right ideas, partly because I think that short stories are more difficult. I think learning to write short stories also made me attracted toward a paring down of the novel form.

When I finally got tired of arguing with her and decided to write a novel as if I was some kind of formulaic, genre writing drone, just to prove to her how awful it would be, I wrote the first book of the Dresden Files.

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.

All novels are experimental.

If you're writing a book where you want to make a positive truth claim, then you should absolutely call it nonfiction or memoir. If you don't want to make that claim - if that's not what's important to you; if you're more interested in storytelling and interiority and interpersonal relationships than in objective, checkable facts about the world - then why wouldn't you call it a novel, and take advantage of what that gets you, of the extra freedom, of belonging to the tradition of the novel?

The novel does not simply recount experience, it adds to experience.

The novelist screws up his courage in order to invest another two or three years in another attempt to float a boat of original design upon an invented ocean.

All great works of literature either dissolve a genre or invent one.