John C. Hawkes Quotes

I am a better novelist than a poet, playwright, or essayist.

The trouble with calling a book a novel, well, it's not like I'm writing the same book all the time, but there is a continuity of my interests, so when I start writing a book, if I call it 'a novel,' it separates it from other books.

I wrote a novel. It's called 'The Middlesteins.' It's fiction. It's not a memoir. I'm not a spokesperson.

I write contemporary fiction, and that is what my readers want to read.

I come from a prose background. I come from short story background, and that led me into novels.

For after my marriage I had made various attempts to write fiction. They were clearly failures.

I've never been a true fan of the short story and have only published a single example of my own.

I can't stand the short story form, which, after all, is a magazine form.

The short story has been here and is here and will be here as long as we are.

I think most short story writers, at one time or another, over the course of several books, naturally skirt near the edge of one genre or another.

The novel is a formidable mass, and it is so amorphous - no mountain in it to climb, no Parnassus or Helicon, not even a Pisgah. It is most distinctly one of the moister areas of literature - irrigated by a hundred rills and occasionally degenerating into a swamp. I do not wonder that the poets despise it, though they sometimes find themselves in it by accident. And I am not surprised at the annoyance of the historians when by accident it finds itself among them.

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

A novel is utterly your own creation, a very private process. I think of a novel as a noun and a screenplay as a verb. In a novel, very little needs to happen; you can explore a person's memories and thoughts and fantasies. In a screenplay, it's all action; you must push the story on.

I'm a strange kind of author - I like assignments. I wasn't clever enough to invent an iconic figure like Salander, but she's my kind of girl.

I would like to write a book that wasn't so violent and weird, but I just don't think I can do that with my talent. I don't think it would come off.

I think the short story is a very underrated art form. We know that novels deserve respect.

I write novellas because I don't like loose sprawling prose.

Stephen King has inspired me with his humor and honesty, and his admonition that the author's job is to tell the truth.

When I write a novel, I want it to be completely different from a screenplay. I'm very conscious of the difference, and I want novels to work purely as novels. Otherwise I don't see how they'll survive - why don't we just all go to the movies or watch television.

It's funny, because I don't think of myself as a novelist. I think of myself as a writer.

Of course, all writers draw upon their personal experiences in describing day-to-day life and human relationships, but I tend to keep my own experiences largely separate from my stories.

I'm more interested in character than events. I've observed that about myself as a writer. I find events, even the most dramatic sort, not to be such fertile ground.

I'm a novelist. I'm not a crusader, and I'm not an editorial writer. And I'm not writing fiction to convince anybody of anything.

I find that short stories are almost like palate cleansers or brain cleansers.

What greatly annoys me is sometimes you see the short story being described as a training ground for the novel. Kind of like an apprenticeship. And in lots of ways, it's a far harder form.