novel creation Quotes

The genuinely significant creation, whether an idea, or a work of art, or a scientific discovery, is most likely to be seen at first as erroneous, bad, or foolish. Later it may be seen as obvious, something self-evident to all. Only still later does it receive its final evaluation as a creative contribution. It seems clear no contemporary mortal can satisfactorily evaluate a creative product at the time it is formed, and this statement is increasingly true the greater the novelty of the creation.

An invention is something that was "impossible" up to then that's why governments grant patents.

Is it an original idea? Or is it something where you're literally a creative collagist? You're taking pieces of the world that you see around you and that are inside of you and put them together in a way that you see fit.

'The Lake of Dreams' grew gradually, over many years, elements and ideas accruing until they gained enough critical mass to become a novel.

For me, the process of writing a novel happens mostly in your head before you actually start writing.

I love to read. I remember hearing that the average author takes two years to write a book. So when I read a book, I feel like I am getting two years of life experiences.

There is no such thing as a secure writer: every novel is an impossible mountain.

Books aren't made in the way that babies are: they are made like pyramids. There's some long-pondered plan, and then great blocks of stone are placed one on top of the other, and it's back-breaking, sweaty, time consuming work. And all to no purpose! It just stands there in the desert! But it towers over it prodigiously. Jackals piss at the base of it, and bourgeois clamber to the top of it, etc. Continue this comparison.

I wrote The Grapes of Wrath in one hundred days, but many years of preparation preceded it.

I think one of the good things about writing novels is that you always start from scratch.

The process, not the results, have to be the reason a writer writes. Otherwise, creating a four-hundred-page novel is just too daunting a task.

The writing of a novel is taking life as it already exists, not to report it but to make an object, toward the end that the finished work might contain this life inside it and offer it to the reader. The essence will not be, of course, the same thing as the raw material; it is not even of the same family of things. The novel is something that never was before and will not be again.

If there's a new idea, a new invention, or a new gas, or a new whatever you know, It should be brought at least into the open instead of carrying these same old burdens around with you.

Whenever I write a novel, most of the time it starts with barest slip of an idea.

A novel usually takes me two years. A year to research and plan and dream. Then a year to write.

I wrote 'Don't Look Back' in November 2011, and when I wrote the novel, it wasn't contracted, so there was a freedom in that - no expectations or anything like that. It was also my first contemporary novel I'd written and sold, which was to Disney/Hyperion in January of 2012.

Most good novelists have been women or homosexuals. The novel is the triumphant evolved creation, one increasingly has to think, of these two groups, who have cooperated more closely in this domain than in any other.

You don't want it to be a replica or an imitation. You want to create something fresh, original, very unique.