James Ivory Quotes

I don't like to talk about work in progress, but the novel I'm working on now is definitely not horror.

I think I've written 40 books, and none of them have been heavy on action. I'm an introspective person.

Oh you know, I've been writing a novel.

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

I spend about a year between novels.

'Goon Squad' took about three years to write and that's the short end. My second novel, 'Look at Me,' took six years.

The novel, for me, was an accident. I really don't consider myself a novelist.

It makes more sense to write one big book - a novel or nonfiction narrative - than to write many stories or essays. Into a long, ambitious project you can fit or pour all you possess and learn.

What I enjoy about reviewing and writing for newspapers and periodicals is simply the chance to talk about all kinds of books and lots of them.

I'll agonize over sentences. Mostly because you're trying to create specific effects with sentences, and because there are a number of different voices in the book.

I suspect there are two kinds of novelists. Those who have a point of view and have something to say and then write a novel in order to say that thing, and those of us who write the book in order to find out what we think about that thing.

Well, 'The Wellspring' was written from 1983 to 1986. And it had a section in the beginning that was poems that began from others' experience.

I never see a novel as a film while I'm writing it. Mostly because novels and films are so different, and I'm such an internal novelist.

Ideas come from all over, but as I write more and more, I find I'm always hunting for mood: I want to write a novel with a pervasive mood that sticks with you after you close the cover.

I can't change overnight into a serious literary author. You can't compare apples to oranges. William Faulkner was a great literary genius. I am not.

I have a really good idea for a novel and would like to just kind of try my hand at fiction. I'm starting to kind of get a really good body of work going from a literary standpoint. As long as the audience is there, man, I'll keep cranking them out.

You're not going to make Hemingway better by adding animations.

I've written only two novels, but they're both long ones, and they each took a decade to write.

I always knew writing a novel was a great thing.

I should tell you that many people think that authors just cut and paste from real life into books. It doesn't work quite that way.

It takes me three or four years to research and write each book and the individual stories stay with you for a long time afterwards.

There isn't any distinction between a reader and a writer - reading is so much a part of it.

I have a slightly bad back, which has made an enormous contribution to American literature.

I love to read. And right now I'm on my last hundred pages of 'The Corrections' by Jonathan Franzen, and I really enjoyed it. His writing is just - he's one of those writers where you just go, 'There are people just meant to be novel writers.'

I can't write a book like 'Lamb' or 'Fool' every year. It just takes too much research and craft.