V. S. Naipaul Quotes

I didn't think I could pull off a novel.

The novel, for me, was an accident. I really don't consider myself a novelist.

Everyone has early fiction fantasies, but it wasn't until my second child Betsy was born that I allowed the urge to write a novel bubble up.

Jigsaw Lady is the working title of a science fiction novel I've had in my head for darn near 15 years. I think I'll start work on it next year (in all my spare time) but I'd like to get it finished some day.

The best novel I wrote was one called 'Crusoe's Daughter,' which never won any prizes. But I was getting somewhere in that. I'm not sure I have in any of the others.

Every novel generates its own climate, when you get going.

Novels are so interior and idiosyncratic and such a solitary process.

I enjoyed writing 'Tashan' very much.

It's really hard to be a story writer - no matter how much acclaim you get - and not write a novel.

If writing a novel is a year's exile to a foreign country, writing a short story is a weekend spent somewhere exotic. They're much more like vacations, more exciting and different, and you're off.

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

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

Usually after finishing a novel, I have a head full of bad ideas for the next one.

It makes more sense to write one big book - a novel or nonfiction narrative - than to write many stories or essays. Into a long, ambitious project you can fit or pour all you possess and learn.

I wrote my first short story in third grade.

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.

The move to creating stories was a natural progression for me, but the most pivotal time was probably in 6th grade: That year, a friend introduced me to the stories of Ray Bradbury, and a student teacher introduced me to creative writing.

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.

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

I never know what I'm going to write next. If I'm still writing the book but I'm very near the end, and I begin to think of what I'd like to do next, then I'll know that what I'm writing is in hand. I'll think of an ending and it will be fine.

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

The only way to be a novelist, to think that you can create something others will give themselves up to for a dozen hours or more, is to have psychotic self-belief.

I always knew writing a novel was a great thing.

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.

I got into writing because books and stories were always a big part of my life. I loved listening to them and then reading them, and I loved making them up.