D. H. Lawrence Quotes

Novelists do not swing on the same pendulums as critics.

In order to be a living, breathing thing, a novel has to be failed in some kind of way. Or at least that's how I keep writing them.

Playing with different genres and perspectives and ways of telling stories is one of the perks of being a novelist, but at the same time, I want precision. And in order to be precise about stuff, you have to get personal. Symbolism is very boring.

The author may not interpret. But he must tell why and how he wrote his book.

Academics love to make theories about a body of work, but each book consumes the writer and is the sum of his or her world.

I don't think you need to be so result-oriented when you're trying to define the success of an art work. I think we can allow some unpredictability.

I don't really have those kinds of intentions when I write a scene. I try to follow the internal logic of the fiction, rather than make an argument or an assertion.

I found some time ago that I have to be careful, while working on a novel, what I read.

I think novelists should be disciplined and self-imposed working hours. I work a lot, but I don't feel that I'm working. I always feel that there is a child in me, healthy, and I'm playing.

I suspect there are two kinds of novelists. Those who have a point of view and have something to say and then write a novel in order to say that thing, and those of us who write the book in order to find out what we think about that thing.

I'm much more interested in allowing a story to happen, and people find whatever meaning is in there.

Writing a novel is actually searching for victims. As I write I keep looking for casualties. The stories uncover the casualties.

Since I grew up, I have never deliberately used any technique at all other than the physical shaping of my tale so that it more or less resembles what has been thought of as a novel for these last two hundred years.

Writing criticism is to writing fiction and poetry as hugging the shore is to sailing in the open sea.

In general, when I'm writing, I concentrate on the story itself, and I leave it to other people, such as agents and publishers, to work out who it's for.

I don't think any novelist should be concerned with literature.

Dealing with poetry is a daunting task, simply because the reason one does it as an editor at all is because one is constantly coming to terms with one's own understanding of how to understand the world.

When I start writing a novel, I have no sense of direction, no idea, really nothing.

It's been a while since I've written a novel aimed at the adult market, but I never sit down and say to myself, 'Okay, now I'm going to write something for us old folks.' I get gripped by an idea, and I go where the idea takes me.

Out of respect to writers, you have to read the book in the way in which the author visualised it going out into the world.

I never know as a writer when I set out into a novel where it's going to take me.

Critics, at least generally, want to regard works of fiction as independent entities, whose virtues and failures must be reckoned apart from the circumstances of their creation, and even apart from the intentions of their creator.

There is no better way of elevating the novel than by making it into a construct which contains ideas.

I'm not going to get into the writer's skills or what he was trying to portray because that's not fair. I can only say what I felt was trying to be portrayed there.

I'll write anything; I don't want to judge its form.