I think most novelists I know, certainly including me, feel the novels choose them rather than vice-versa.

In the end I write the novels I need to write when I need to write them.

I think most novelists I know, certainly including me, feel the novels choose them rather than vice-versa.

By the plain form of my delirium I will blast the obstruction of every form around me into something barely called shadow. I sail. I swim to you. I know the water.

I believe novels can have secrets from their author, a notion I imagine would appall Nabokov.

In LA, you think you're making something up, but it's making you up.

Before I begin a novel I have a strong sense of at least one central character and how the story begins, and a more vague sense of where things may wind up, but at some point, if the novel is any good at all, the story and characters take on lives of their own and take over the book, and the writer has to be open to that.