Candace Bushnell Quotes

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.

In my experience, a novel is the culmination of various thoughts and impressions collected over time, until something comes along to give them a shape, to turn them into a story.

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

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

I'm just trying to write a good story, strictly from imagination. People just think it's random, they don't see the rewriting, phrasing of characters, choosing the words, bringing the world to light in which the characters live in. That creates an illusion that this is real.

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

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.

The thing I love about being a novelist is that with each project, you invent a new world. You approach it with a different set of aesthetic and structural ideas, and you grapple with a different series of problems in figuring out how to tell the story. And yet there are certain concerns that stay constant.

I always wanted to be a writer, and I did want to be a novelist. In college I took a couple of classes that taught me I would never be a novelist. I discovered I had no imagination. My short stories were always thinly veiled memoir.

'For Whom the Bell Tolls' was a problem which I carried on each day. I knew what was going to happen in principle. But I invented what happened each day I wrote.

The materials of the novelist must be real; they must be gathered from the field of humanity by his actual observation.

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.

The trick to being a novelist is to act like an iceberg. Make it seem as if you're displaying only one-tenth of what you know, and the other nine-tenths isn't visible and never mind if that part is pure styrofoam!

I'm a great believer in gathering together all your obsessions and seeing if you can make a novel out of them.

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

The great advantage of a novel is you can put in whatever comes into your head - it has the same shape as the human brain.

Every thought and word that a novelist thinks or writes is part of that castle constructed from sands on the beach of Me, including the turret or rampart or moat he may have thought or written on behalf of someone or something else.

When I read 'Room,' I absolutely loved it, and I thought I knew how to make it.

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.

Novels can be a snapshot of a moment in time, or several moments in time, and as a reader, that's what I really like, and as a writer, it's what I'm drawn to also.

Authors make stuff up. Let's not pretend it's any more magical than that.

Every book is its own experience, the writing of it.

I don't think I have a very novelistic brain. I like to read, but I don't know if I could ever write a novel.

I believe any fiction writer is inspired by real life.