William Nicholson Quotes

I obviously prefer writing novels but I take my journalism very seriously, and I enjoy doing it between novels. It gives me an opportunity to move in the outside world.

I had just begun an M.A. in Creative Writing, and I had to write a novel, so I began writing a novel that later became 'A Life Apart.'

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

Writing a novel is not merely going on a shopping expedition across the border to an unreal land: it is hours and years spent in the factories, the streets, the cathedrals of the imagination.

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

I've been writing for a long time. I sat down to write my first novel in the middle of March of 1982.

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.

'The Secret Life of Bees' was my first novel, so I had no process. I was flying by the seat of my pants, as they say, trying to understand how I, as a novelist, would work with story.

I believed, after writing 'Mrs. Kimble,' that I knew how to write a novel. I quickly discovered that I only knew how to write that novel. 'Baker Towers' was a different beast entirely; and I felt as though I had to learn to write all over again.

I stopped writing short fiction early on - I was never really good at it, and I never liked the results. So I stopped trying to fit the material I was working with into these tidy little short fiction packages.

I started writing seriously when I was 18, wrote my first novel when I was 22, and I've never stopped writing since.

When I'm writing a novel, I'm dealing with a double life. I live in the present at the same time that I live in the past with my characters. It is this that makes a novelist so eccentric and unpleasant.

I stopped being an engaged journalist and became a disengaged novelist.

The short story, it's not a step on the way to becoming a novelist.

I wrote about four novels before I wrote a word of journalism.

At the age of seventeen, I decided I would spend my life writing fiction. I didn't know what this entailed, exactly - a room, I supposed. A room and books and paper and solitude.

Novel-writing is, for the novelist, a game of let's pretend.

I couldn't have been the novelist I was without being the journalist I was.

Writing a novel isn't like building a brick wall. You don't figure out how to do it, and then it gets easier each time because you know what you're doing. With writing a novel, you have to figure it out each time. Each time you start over, you just have the language and the idea and the hope.

What I like about writing novels is that I'm in my own world for nine months.

I'm becoming more of a novelist as I get older. The novel just seems the truer form. There's less artifice involved.

When I write, I try to capture one of those pivotal moments. If I succeed, I have shifted the reader's view of the world, just a little. The character is not the only one to experience change. That is my job, shifting perceptions, one story at a time. The trouble is, I don't like writing. But I love having written.

I started out as a novelist and wrote several novels before deciding to publish one, and I fully intend to go back to the form.

I've never abandoned the novel.

Writing novels preserves you in a state of innocence - a lot passes you by - simply because your attention is otherwise diverted.