Janet Frame Quotes

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

I don't write tracts, I write novels. I'm not a preacher, I'm a fiction 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.

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.

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

For me, writing a novel is like having a dream. Writing a novel lets me intentionally dream while I'm still awake. I can continue yesterday's dream today, something you can't normally do in everyday life.

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.

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

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

You have to have heart's passion to write a novel.

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

For me, literature is a complex game, both mental and concrete, which is acted out in a physical manner on the page.

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 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 quickly realised that it is difficult to get started when writing a novel. You have this dream of what you want to create, but it is like walking around a swimming pool and hesitating to jump in because the water is too cold.

When I began to write seriously, 40 years ago now, my chosen form was the novel.

The trick to being a novelist is to act like an iceberg. Make it seem as if you're displaying only one-tenth of what you know, and the other nine-tenths isn't visible and never mind if that part is pure styrofoam!

I'm a great believer in gathering together all your obsessions and seeing if you can make a novel out of them.

The good thing about writing a novel is that you're creating an imaginary world and can take a break when you need to.

The process of writing a novel is getting to know more about the novel until you know everything about it. And it's been described as a kind of dreamlike state where you're letting the novel make its own shape, and you're putting into it the pleasure of creation, which is intoxicating.

I really enjoy writing novels. It's like the ocean. You can just build a boat and take off.

I'm a novelist: I spend a great part of my day pretending to myself that I'm in a different world, being a different person, faced with decisions I pretend I haven't created.

A novel is a great act of passion and intellect, carpentry and largess. From the very beginning, I wrote to explain my own life to myself, and I invited readers who chose to make the journey with me to join me on the high wire.

A novel is a work of poetry. In order to write it, one must have tranquility of spirit and of impression.