P. J. Harvey Quotes

I like movies. I've written screenplays as a sort of procrastination thing for me. Like I'll work for a couple months on this idea that's been kicking around and then like 30 pages in I'll just go try a novel because it's a lot easier. That's what I know. So why am I killing myself?

A man who is not born with the novel-writing gift has a troublesome time of it when he tries to build a novel. I know this from experience. He has no clear idea of his story; in fact he has no story. He merely has some people in his mind, and an incident or two, also a locality, and he trusts he can plunge those people into those incidents with interesting results.

I lack the skill to hold a story line for the length required for a novel or even a short story. I have never had an idea that could withstand a hundred thousand words, or even ten thousand words of rubber meeting the road.

Don’t try to write a novel. Write short stories and then figure out how to connect them.

I mostly write short stories. They are best written in a continuous creative process. You have a feel of immediacy.

When you're writing a novel, you're still telling a story. But you're telling it very differently. It's a craft like anything else.

If writing novels is like planting a forest, then writing short stories is more like planting a garden.

Usually after finishing a novel, I have a head full of bad ideas for the next one.

I found that I could write two kinds of short stories: I could write very absurd, kind of surrealistic, funny stories; or I could write very dark, realistic - hyper-realistic - stories. I was never happy with that, because I couldn't meld the two.

I think of novels as houses. You live in them over the course of a long period, both as a reader and as a writer.

When I was starting out, I did not do short fiction well, because I kept wanting to write books.

Well, to be honest I think I'm a better short story writer than a novelist. Novels I find very hard, hours and hours, weeks and weeks, of conscious thought - whereas short stories slip out painlessly in a few days.

I've tried to write deep and serious. I spent years working to write a story that would make my writing group cry.

I started writing morning pages just to keep my hand in, you know, just because I was a writer and I didn't know what else to do but write. And then one day as I was writing, a character came sort of strolling in and I realized, Oh my God, I don't have to be just a screenwriter. I can write novels.

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

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

I consider myself a writer. I don't favour any type of writing. I sometimes wish short stories came more easily to me.

I stopped writing short fiction early on - I was never really good at it, and I never liked the results. So I stopped trying to fit the material I was working with into these tidy little short fiction packages.

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.

I don't think I'm a natural novelist. Plot is definitely one of my weaker points. I've been working on it a long time, and it's not getting much better.

I studied the short story as part of my creative writing course at university but then set off as a novelist. Generally, there is a sense that even if you want to write short stories, you need to do a novel first.

My novels aren't really generated by a single conceptual spark; it's more a process of many different elements that come together unexpectedly over a long period of time.

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.

When I want to read a novel, I write one.