Anna Quindlen Quotes

When an author creates a town in her novels, she spends a great deal of time visualizing the streets and buildings, landmarks and topography. And while the town becomes real in her imagination, it's rare for an author to see the place she's created actually spring to life.

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.

Writing novels is where I'm most comfortable. It's a very intimate experience.

When I'm writing a novel, I'm usually just trying to write about things that are interesting to me.

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.

When I want to read a novel, I write one.

I spend so long writing each of my novels that by the time I'm done with one, I'm ready to discover a totally different world.

Yes, writing a novel, my boy, is like driving pigs to market - you have one of them making a bolt down the wrong lane; another won't get over the right stile.

I finish the book so I can see how it's going to end. I write that first sentence, and if it's the right first sentence, it leads to the right second sentence and three years later you have a 500-page manuscript, but it really is like going on a trip, going on a journey. It's a voyage.

A friend of mine who writes history books said to me that he thought that the two creatures most to be pitied were the spider and the novelist - their lives hanging by a thread spun out of their own guts. But in some ways I think writers of fiction are the creatures most to be envied, because who else besides the spider is allowed to take that fragile thread and weave it into a pattern? What a gift of grace to be able to take the chaos from within and from it to create some semblance of order.

When you write a novel, you make other people see your imaginary friends.

I don't have a name and I don't have a plot. I have the typewriter and I have white paper and I have me, and that should add up to a novel.

What interests me in writing a novel is taking really remote voices, characters, and stories and beginning to create some kind of web.

I've never abandoned the novel.

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

With a novel, there is no hurrying it. You're constantly walking into the unknown.

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

What I like about writing a stand alone novel is you're starting with a fresh world and fresh characters. Part of what I love about writing is that journey of discovery where it's all new to me as well.

I'm just trying to write a good story, strictly from imagination. People just think it's random, they don't see the rewriting, phrasing of characters, choosing the words, bringing the world to light in which the characters live in. That creates an illusion that this is real.

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.

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.

The thing I love about being a novelist is that with each project, you invent a new world. You approach it with a different set of aesthetic and structural ideas, and you grapple with a different series of problems in figuring out how to tell the story. And yet there are certain concerns that stay constant.

Sometimes I feel that the people I'm writing are more real to me than the people around me. When you take that imaginative leap, you're living so much in that world.

I love telling stories. Creating a character, a world, a whole universe out of nothing. That part I can't get enough of.

However, the difficulties and pleasures of the writing itself are similar for a novel with a historical setting and a novel with a contemporary setting, as far as I'm concerned.