Jacob Anderson Quotes

When the narrative itself starts knocking on the glassed-in box that was your prescription for how you were going to write this novel... you have to listen to it.

When I feel like being a director, I write a novel.

I know I'm not a wordsmith. And I don't write poetry. Sometimes I think I should, because it's really helpful. But I always wanted to write novels.

I knew from my television work that I could sit down and put words on paper but didn't know if I had the talent to tell a story in novel form.

After 20 years of writing academic prose and lectures, it seems very familiar and straightforward to me. Writing a novel for the first time, I was reminded of just how difficult it is to figure out how to get this stuff done when you don't really know what you're doing.

A lot of people, I think, harbor some kind of ambition to write a novel - they say, 'One day I'm going to write a novel,' and they maybe find the first three pages quite easy, and then they hit a kind of brick wall, and they think that that brick wall means that they're not a writer.

I get scripts and think, 'There's not enough here to get my teeth stuck into.' That's a result of studying English, where you luxuriate in these big, lush novels.

I'm becoming more of a novelist as I get older. The novel just seems the truer form. There's less artifice involved.

There's nothing worse than sitting down to write a novel and saying, 'Well, okay, I'm going to do something of high artistic worth.'

I don't write tracts, I write novels. I'm not a preacher, I'm a fiction writer.

You have to have heart's passion to write a novel.

For me, writing a short story is much, much harder than writing a novel.

I love writing letters. In order to write a novel in first person, I think I needed an addressee.

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.

It isn't as if a writer merely records life as it unfurls. Reality does not automatically transcribe as literature; real people are not shapely, compelling characters to be harvested. Charming facts and sharp observations rarely slide seamlessly into whatever narrative is at hand.

No one knows how to write a novel until it's been written.

I am trying to write novels for properly clever people, but I also want them to be proper novels that also stick in a person's mind and have an atmosphere about them.

A novel is a big thing. It's difficult to hold the whole story in your mind, especially when you've finished a first draft and are still giddy from the flow of creative juices.

When you write a novel, you never have to be in the service of the reader. My only concern with my books is that the world that's created be as logical and whole as possible.

The novelist in me is probably hiding behind all the stories I write, looking for ways to connect them and continue the conversation with readers. Maybe I'm writing one long narrative, and each book, however different from the last, is just a chapter.

I think many people would say that writers like Stephen King have hypergraphia.

There are people who say they want to write novels. They think, 'I'll learn my craft on the romance novel.' If you don't love the genre, it's going to show, and it's not going to be a good book.

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

I quickly realised that it is difficult to get started when writing a novel. You have this dream of what you want to create, but it is like walking around a swimming pool and hesitating to jump in because the water is too cold.

'The Secret Life of Bees' was my first novel, so I had no process. I was flying by the seat of my pants, as they say, trying to understand how I, as a novelist, would work with story.