Alan Moore Quotes

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.

If I want to write a movie, I'll write a screenplay, but if I have an idea for a book, it's something that I think can only be done novelistically.

If you're writing an opinion piece, it's your job to write your opinion. If, on the other hand, you wrote a novel, as Virginia Woolf tells us, it would be inappropriate if you let your novel be influenced by your political opinions.

I've tried very hard and I've never found any resemblance between the people I know and the people in my novels.

The novel avoids the sublime and seeks out the interesting.

A good novel is a good novel, pointe finale. And I think what I'm writing is exactly that.

In order to be a living, breathing thing, a novel has to be failed in some kind of way. Or at least that's how I keep writing them.

I don't assume, because I can write screenplays, that I know how to write a novel. It's a very different world. There's a craft involved in storytelling, and it's a different kind of craft. But yes, someday I will do that. It just might be awhile.

I have assiduously avoided calling my books novels.

Language leads a double life - and so does the novelist. You chat with family and friends, you attend to your correspondence, you consult menus and shopping lists, you observe road signs, and so on. Then you enter your study, where language exists in quite another form - as the stuff of patterned artifice.

The idea that an author can extricate her or his own ongoing life experience from the tale being written is a conceit of very little worth.

Asking the author of historical novels to teach you about history is like expecting the composer of a melody to provide answers about radio transmission.

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.

He can develop sense and style, in the manner of distinguished modern prose, in which event he may be sure that the result will not fall into any objective form.

I am a writer of fragments.

Writing a novel that crosses genres is a risk, but one well worth taking.

When I started off with Trainspotting, it was the way the characters came to me. That's how they sounded to me. It seemed pretentious to sound any other way. I wasn't making any kind of political statement.

The novelist, he's not a philosopher, not a technician of spoken language. He's someone who writes, above all, and through the novel asks questions.

Academics love to make theories about a body of work, but each book consumes the writer and is the sum of his or her world.

I'm a failed poet. Reading poetry helps me to see the world differently, and I try to infuse my prose with figurative language, which goes against the trend in fiction.

I think once you write fiction, you put it out, and it can be interpreted in a variety of ways, some of which are going to be shocking to the writer.

What does Sinclair know about anything? He's just a writer.

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.

I don't think I could write a book that had an ideological plan going in - I think that would be a terrible book.