When I am writing fiction, I believe I am much better organized, more methodical - one has to be when writing a novel. Writing poetry is a state of free float. Margaret Atwood
When I wrote 'The Pregnant Widow' three or four years ago, I tried to reread my first novel, 'The Rachel Papers,' because their young heroes are the same age. I couldn't finish it. It seemed to me so technically slapdash and weak. Martin Amis
When readers close the covers on 'Running the Rift,' I want them to understand that it is not a genocide novel but rather a story of hope and rebirth. Naomi Benaron
When writing a novel a writer should create living people; people not characters. A character is a caricature. Ernest Hemingway
When you're writing a novel, you don't want the reader to come out of it voting yes or no to some question. Life is more complicated than that. Reality simply consists of Margaret Atwood
When you're writing a novel, you spend four years sitting in your basement and a year waiting for the book to come out and then you get the feedback. When you do work online, the moment you're finished making it, people start responding to it which is really fun and allows for a kind of community development you just can't have in novels. John Green
Writing a novel is not method acting and I find it easy to step out of it at cocktail hour. Bret Easton Ellis
Writing a story or a novel is one way of discovering sequence in experience, of stumbling upon cause and effect in the happenings of a writer's own life. Eudora Welty
Writing fiction is for me a fraught business, an occasion of daily dread for at least the first half of the novel, and sometimes all the way through. The work process is totally different from writing nonfiction. You have to sit down every day and make it up. Joan Didion