I’m a natural novelist. I’m interested in the person and the group, and how they mesh. And one of the ways I don’t want them to mesh is for the person to be subsumed into the group.
Every novel deals with social problems. It can’t help it because the protagonist must come in conflict with his group. So the author has to offer an analysis of how the group and the protagonist fit. Otherwise, the reader will just say, “This makes no sense,” and will put it away.
After a long day, folk rest at night. After a long summer, folk play games and sit about in the winter. After a long life folk sit about the fire and stay warm, for the chill of death is upon them, and even the thickest bearskin can’t keep off the shivering.
As Fallingwater demonstrates, Wright’s genius was always specific, but also always lively, always daring.
I spent part of my college years in a Marxist commune. I was not a Marxist. I wasn’t even pretending to be one. I was a Marxist-in-law.
As soon as you bring up money, I notice, conversation gets sociological, then political, then moral.
The fact is that the same sequence of days can arrange themselves into a number of different stories.
Trollope wrote so many novels and other works that they tend to crowd each other out.
A novelist is on the cusp between someone who knows everything and someone who knows nothing.
Writing novels is an essentially amateur activity.
The desire to write a novel is the single required prerequisite for writing a novel.
You cannot be an egomaniac on the horse. If you lose your temper and start beating him, either you will destroy him, or he will destroy you. As soon as you start riding horses seriously, you’re being disciplined on a daily basis about how ignorant you are and what there is left for you to learn.
Novelists never have to footnote.
Americans took a great deal too much credit for creating wealth, when most of the time they had really just been living off natural bounty unprecedented in the history of the world.
Charles Dickens was an avid seeker of names – he read directories and looked for odd names on gravestones.
My characters never die screaming in rage. They attempt to pull themselves back together and go on. And that’s basically a conservative view of life.
Hungry ears are sharp ones.
There weren’t too many books by women that were taught in school, so I read those on my own, and the books I read were as accessible as the ones we were reading in school.
In every society, the artists will be the ones who set themselves up as contrary to whatever the society expects.
Love is a general emotion. Marriage is exactingly specific.