Women want love to be a novel men a short story.

If to live is to progress if you are lucky from foolishness to wisdom then to write novels is to broadcast the various stages of your foolishness.

Novels are the Socratic dialogues of our time. Practical wisdom fled from school wisdom into this liberal form.

The stupidity of people comes from having an answer for everything. The wisdom of the novel comes from having a question for everything.

I was going to be a great woman novelist. Then the war came along and I think it's hard for young people today don't you to realize that when World War II happened we were dying to go and help our country.

I don't think you can tell the objective truth about a person. That's why people write novels.

A petty reason perhaps why novelists more and more try to keep a distance from journalists is that novelists are trying to write the truth and journalists are trying to write fiction.

The truth is I wrote a novel when I was 23. It's hideously bad. Truly rotten.

There's a unique bond of trust between readers and authors that I don't believe exists in any other art form as a reader I trust a novelist to give me his or her best effort however flawed.

Writing doesn't come real easy to me. I couldn't write a novel in a year. It wouldn't be readable. I don't let an editor even look at it until the second year because it would just scare them. I just have to trust that all these scraps and dead-ends will find a way.

The first sentence of every novel should be: Trust me this will take time but there is order here very faint very human. Meander if you want to get to town.

Mark Twain was a great traveler and he wrote three or four great travel books. I wouldn't say that I'm a travel novelist but rather a novelist who travels - and who uses travel as a background for finding stories of places.

In the case of my book I don't think it's really the coming-out gay novel that everyone really needed even though it was received as such. The boy is too creepy he betrays his teacher the only adult man with whom he's enjoyed a sexual experience etc.

As a teacher at Princeton I'm surrounded by people who work hard so I just make good use of my time. And I don't really think of it as work - writing a novel in one sense is a problem-solving exercise.

The novelist must look on humanity without partiality or prejudice. His sympathy like that of the historian must be unbounded and untainted by sect or party.

I think of novels in architectural terms. You have to enter at the gate and this gate must be constructed in such a way that the reader has immediate confidence in the strength of the building.

I'm not sure I have the physical strength to undertake a novel.

I really think more fledgling novelists - and many current and even established novelists - should get out into the real world and cover local politics sports culture and crime and write it up on deadline.

Monday Night Football started in 1970 and when it started it was something extremely special because sports had not been aired in prime time. So it was a novelty and a lot of people thought it wouldn't work and of course it worked spectacularly well.

I find interesting characters or lessons that resonate with people and sometimes I write about them in the sports pages sometimes I write them in a column sometimes in a novel sometimes a play or sometimes in nonfiction. But at the core I always say to myself 'Is there a story here? Is this something people want to read?'

Stories in which the destruction of society occurs are explorations of social fears and issues that filmmakers novelists playwrights painters have been examining for a long time.

Since I have come to America I am often asked whether my next novel will be set in America. I don't think it will. I think I will be living in America for some time to come but while living in America I would like to write about Japanese society from the outside.

If you're going to kill someone there isn't much reason to get all worked up about it and angry - you just pull the trigger. Angry discussions beforehand are a waste of time. We need to smile at Novell while we pull the trigger.

I'm mostly a novelist these days but I have written short stories in Fantasy Science Fiction and horror.