Jasper Fforde Quotes

I want to do some fiction writing, I've had some pretty good luck with short stories, I'd like to do a couple of larger things.

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

It takes me two to three years to write a novel. A screenplay is 100 pages and takes five years.

I did not set out to write another novel. One day I sat down with the thought of trying my hand at a piece of nonfiction, a personal memoir of youth, but over the next several weeks, without intending it, the work began evolving into what has become 'Tomcat in Love.'

I have some other novels I want to write. I have a lot of short stories - I love the short 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.

Once I started writing novels, I understood how hard it was to write really good short stories.

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.

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

My novels come from within me; they are things I feel I want to do.

I do want to write about Jane Whitefield again, but only when I have a good enough idea - something I've figured out about her that's news and that's worth a reader's time.

I've never abandoned the novel.

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.'

With a novel, there is no hurrying it. You're constantly walking into the unknown.

I'm writing another novel and I know what I'm going to do after, which may be something more like this again, maybe some strange mixture of fiction and non-fiction.

I never know how a novel is going to end, because you don't really know what's going to be at the bottom of a novel until you excavate it.

I just finished a novel, and I'm back kind of noodling on the screenplays. Screenplays are tough. I am making music, I'm just not sure what kind of music it is or where it's going.

There comes a point when you're writing a novel when you're in it so deep that the life of the novel becomes more real to you than life itself. You have to write your way out of it; once you're there, it's too late to abandon.

I was about 28-29 when I wrote my first story, and that was called 'The Garden of Abdul Gasazi.'

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.

A novel usually takes me two years. A year to research and plan and dream. Then a year to write.

I do think novels are overlooked. I did write one some years ago that I think is quite good, called 'The End of the Story,' not to blow my own horn.

I set out to write a screenplay but, since my early 20s, had dreamed of writing a novel.

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.