Howard Gordon Quotes

Writing a novel is an incredibly free experience. One puts one's self in a narrative mode. You can go off in any direction - the past, the future, or go laterally, or include one's own beliefs. It's total freedom.

It may sound very strange, but I love the freedom that writing a novel gives me. It is an unhindered experience. If I come after a bad day, I can decide that my protagonist will die on page 100 of my novel in a 350-page story.

The good thing about writing a novel is that you're creating an imaginary world and can take a break when you need to.

Being a novelist, you can roam around with a story and indulge yourself.

What I like about writing novels is that I'm in my own world for nine months.

When I wrote my first book, 'The Tennis Party', my overriding concern was that I didn't write the autobiographical first novel. I was so, so determined not to write about a 24-year-old journalist. It was going to have male characters, and middle-aged people, so I could say, 'Look, I'm not just writing about my life, I'm a real author.'

A novelist has a specific poetic license which also applies to his own life.

Every now and then I'll do little things, a short story or something, that doesn't have any fantastical elements, but mostly I like the power of playing God and I like to imagine things.

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.

If I had a plot that was all set in advance, why would I want go through the agony of writing the novel? A novel is a kind of exploration and discovery, for me at any rate.

Writing a novel was completely awesome because parts of it could suck and I could throw them away. I didn't have to know the ending until I got there.

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

In writing fiction, I can be free. I can use my life. The raw material is my experiences.

Novel-writing is the only place where someone who would have liked to do anything can still do that vicariously.

When I began to write seriously, 40 years ago now, my chosen form was the novel.

'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.

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

Writing a novel is not method acting and I find it easy to step out of it at cocktail hour.

My temperament is not geared to that of a novelist.

I've tried very hard and I've never found any resemblance between the people I know and the people in my novels.

My first two novels were set in the past, and that freed me up in a lot of ways; it allowed me to find my way into my story and my characters through research.

In TV writing, I felt like Gulliver being tied down by the Lilliputians. There's so much more freedom in fiction writing.

When you write a movie, you have a hundred collaborators. But when you write a novel, it's yours.

For someone who writes fiction, in order to activate the imagination and the unconscious, it's essential to be free.

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.