W. Somerset Maugham Quotes

I think my characters with my fingers, I think my characters with my guts. But when I say I think them, that is what I do, I feel them with the sympathetic neurons and I work out with my brain what it is that I am trying to write about, or I can't do it.

I wasn't aware I'd write the novel when I wrote the New Yorker story either. And the narration of their construction in 10:04 is fiction, however flickering.

That's one of the reasons I take a lot of consolation in fiction. You have years to work on it. I think that allows you to reach for the best part of your reader instead of a lot of the internet stuff, in which you're kind of reaching for the worst or the most shallow part of your reader.

I always think about the books I'm doing in pretty much the same way. I'm simply trying to write that particular novel as well as that particular novel can be written. I want to listen to what it is telling me, trying to figure out what it wants to do as much as what I want to do with it. There's a negotiation that's constant and ongoing between me and the material I'm working with, because I'm trying to listen to it.

Charlie Huston, who showran the first season [of Powers], is a novelist, and likes to internalize fiction as a novelist does.

I don't think I have ever created an entire fiction piece or followed a historical piece and made that into a sermon.

I think most novelists I know, certainly including me, feel the novels choose them rather than vice-versa.

I think directing and writing are very different jobs. Obviously, directing is a more social and managerial job. The other thing about directing is that it's a very, very pragmatic job, and writing isn't.

Finding my way into a novel is always half the battle.

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.

A script is not a piece of literature it's a process.

For me, writing a novel is like solving a puzzle. But I don't intend my novels as puzzles. I intend them as invitations to dance.

People have asked me a lot, 'What comes first? The pictures or the story? The story or the picture?' It's hard to describe because often they seem to come at the same time. I'm seeing images while I'm thinking of the story.

Writing novels is the most exciting.

When you're drawing comics, you get very involved in how the story is going to develop and you spend more time daydreaming on that particular subject.

My process is thinking, thinking and thinking - thinking about my stories for a long time.

I suppose I'm proudest of my novels for what's imagined in them. I think the world of my imagination is a richer and more interesting place than my personal biography.

My novels tend to come about from a fusion of two big ideas, creating a critical mass that then fissions, throwing off hundreds of other particles, riffs, tropes and characters.

I feel like you just need to keep writing until the writing itself just begins to take shape.

When I first started to get into writing, it was via music. I'd generate ideas for songs that would turn into stories, then they'd turn into novels. I was biased toward music.

When I start a new novel, I often write 'test chapters' in different tenses and from different points of view in order to figure out which is best to tell the tale.

Like all novelists, I'm interested in the filters between reality and the imagination.

I get a lot of energy from making things up, which is why I feel I'm a novelist.

A novel, at least for me, cannot be visualized at one time.

I discovered ... that a novel has nothing to do with words in the first instance. Writing a novel is a cosmological matter, like the story told by Genesis (we all have to choose our role models, as Woody Allen puts it).