Eileen Pollack Quotes

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

When you write a novel, you never have to be in the service of the reader. My only concern with my books is that the world that's created be as logical and whole as possible.

In writing literary fiction, you are trying to help yourself. And readers are going to literary fiction not just to be entertained, but because they feel something else will happen; that the experience will take them beyond themselves and show them something they haven't seen before.

I'm mostly a novelist these days, but I have written short stories in Fantasy, Science Fiction and horror.

Being a novelist is the adult version of a kid creating a make-believe world. But unlike a child, a writer of fiction has to come up with a structured story, one that has as much meaning for others as it has for her.

I'm writing exactly the kinds of books I like to write. And they're the kinds of books I like to read. They're popular commercial fiction. That's what they are.

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.

No one knows how to write a novel until it's been written.

I took a fiction-writing workshop my sophomore year at Northwestern, and I hadn't yet read Junot Diaz or George Saunders, Flannery O'Connor. There was something so attractive about those voices.

I think that writers of literary fiction would do well to read more books for children.

I am trying to write novels for properly clever people, but I also want them to be proper novels that also stick in a person's mind and have an atmosphere about them.

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.

Each of my books is different. Deliberately... I wanted to create my society, my people, in their fullness.

A novel is a big thing. It's difficult to hold the whole story in your mind, especially when you've finished a first draft and are still giddy from the flow of creative juices.

My first attraction to writing novels was the plot, that almost extinct animal. Those novels I read which made me want to be a novelist were long, always plotted, novels - not just Victorian novels, but also those of my New England ancestors: Herman Melville and Nathaniel Hawthorne.

I wanted to write a big novel, something epic in scale.

Writing a novel is an intense and lonely business, but you have the reward at the end of a very direct dialogue between you and the reader.

I was an angst-y journal writing kid.

I think many people would say that writers like Stephen King have hypergraphia.

It takes me a very, very long time to write a story, to write a piece of fiction, whatever you call the fiction that I write. I just go about it blindly, feeling my way towards what it has to be.

It's hard, because when you talk about process or your characters ruling your narrative, it sounds like you have no control, but obviously you're ultimately the author, so you do have control.

A novel can enlarge the empathy and imagination of both its author and its reader, and my experience, that sense of enlargement is most intense when I'm transported beyond the narrow limits of my daily life.

I just try to write the best story I can, a story I would love to read, and hope that readers feel the same.

I want to tell stories for everyone, primarily.

You have to have empathy, knowledge and compassion for your characters if you're a writer.