Bret Easton Ellis Quotes

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.

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.

A novel is often a longer process in handling self-doubt.

'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.

After 20 years of writing academic prose and lectures, it seems very familiar and straightforward to me. Writing a novel for the first time, I was reminded of just how difficult it is to figure out how to get this stuff done when you don't really know what you're doing.

There's nothing worse than sitting down to write a novel and saying, 'Well, okay, I'm going to do something of high artistic worth.'

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

I always have a book that I use that somehow inspires my novels.

Novelists do not write as birds sing, by the push of nature. It is part of the job that there should be much routine and some daily stuff on the level of carpentry.

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

Since I grew up, I have never deliberately used any technique at all other than the physical shaping of my tale so that it more or less resembles what has been thought of as a novel for these last two hundred years.

I took a couple of creative writing classes with Joyce Carol Oates at Princeton University, and in my senior year there, I took a long fiction workshop with Toni Morrison. I fell in love with it.

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.

Writing a novel is a terrible experience, during which the hair often falls out and the teeth decay.

I always knew writing a novel was a great thing.

I want to do some fiction writing, I've had some pretty good luck with short stories, I'd like to do a couple of larger things.

SOON was the first novel where I used a rough outline. Usually I have characters and an idea and write as a process of discovery. Like working without a net.

The materials of the novelist must be real; they must be gathered from the field of humanity by his actual observation.

When the narrative itself starts knocking on the glassed-in box that was your prescription for how you were going to write this novel... you have to listen to it.

I should tell you that many people think that authors just cut and paste from real life into books. It doesn't work quite that way.

I've never been comfortable with the idea of using family and friends in stories. Which is why it takes me longer than something else. Because you make them up out of nothing. Doing that is harder.

I love to tell stories and this is my way of getting them down on paper.

I can't write a book like 'Lamb' or 'Fool' every year. It just takes too much research and craft.

Once I started writing novels, I understood how hard it was to write really good short stories.

The great advantage of a novel is you can put in whatever comes into your head - it has the same shape as the human brain.