I set out to write a screenplay but, since my early 20s, had dreamed of writing a novel. – Graeme Simsion
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. – Helen Dunmore
I’m a very organised and rational and linear thinker, and you have to stop all that to write a novel. – Hilary Mantel
I wrote a novel. It’s called ‘The Middlesteins.’ It’s fiction. It’s not a memoir. I’m not a spokesperson. – Jami Attenberg
I used my NEA fellowship to write my novel, ‘In Country,’ which was published by Harper & Row in 1985. – Bobbie Ann Mason
‘The Mahabharata,’ which inspired my novel ‘Palace of Illusions,’ also has many stories embedded within the main tale. – Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni
The valley we lived in could easily be the setting for a fantasy novel or a prairie western novel. It could be anything. – Arthur Slade
In many ways, my entire graphic novel career was a long diversion. Originally, all I wanted to do was to be an underground cartoonist and maybe bring out a groovy underground mag. – Alan Moore
I couldn’t ever write a straight crime novel: there’d be an intrusion of weirdness at some point. – Alastair Reynolds
The novel has always been the form that incorporates other forms. For me, it has always been the ultimate medium. – Chad Harbach
Believe it or not, I sold my first novel, ‘Crank,’ with only seventy-five pages complete. It was in verse then, and it was hard-hitting then. – Ellen Hopkins
The Pacific Northwest, and particularly Whidbey Island, is extremely suited to be a location in a novel. – Elizabeth George
A novel is a conversation starter, and if the author isn’t there for the after-party, both the writer and the reader are missing a lot. – Maggie Stiefvater
I think every first-person narrator in a novel should be compromised. I prefer that word to ‘unreliable.’ – Charles Palliser
