Evan Hunter Quotes

My temperament is not geared to that of a novelist.

I always had a hard time with fiction. It does feel like driving a car in a clown suit. You're going somewhere, but you're in costume, and you're not really fooling anybody. You're the guy in costume, and everybody's supposed to forget that and go along with you. Obviously, it can work, it works all the time - well, it doesn't always work. Still, no matter what, I'm always looking at the form and addressing it, not ignoring it.

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.

The great pleasure for me in writing short stories is the fierce, elegant challenge.

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 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 have no favourite genre or style but treat each novel with the same care, imagination and craftsmanship. It's as difficult to write a crime or a children's novel with a touch of style and grace as it is a literary novel.

Anthony Powell taught me to write; he has such brilliant control of the mechanics of the novel.

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 think it's much more natural as a writer to want to tell one story rather than lots of small stories that are half an hour long.

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.

The hardest part of ghost writing other people's stories is capturing their voices so that it isn't you talking, it's them.

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

My first novel, 'John Crow's Devil,' freed me up to write about the past, and 'The Book of Night Women' freed me up to have a book totally based on voice and being very spontaneous.

I want to be a better writer. I want to learn and grow, to know how to tell stories in a different and more challenging way. I've learned it doesn't get easier each time. It actually gets harder.

I'm the kind of writer who thinks style is just as important as the story being told.

For myself, I feel more natural writing stories or novels than writing plays. I feel more like myself, like I can express myself better, and like I have a greater clarity about what I want to do.

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.'

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

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

Perhaps, all writers walk such a line. In general - as we all do in our dreams - I believe I put something of myself into all the characters in my novels, male as well as female.

I find it an easy way into writing pieces is to think what the character's voice is like, and start from there.

For me, writing a short story is much, much harder than writing a novel.

I don't have a style. I just try to write what the story demands.

I never see a novel as a film while I'm writing it. Mostly because novels and films are so different, and I'm such an internal novelist.