I have never begun a novel which wasn’t going to stretch me further than I had ever stretched before.
We make our own monsters, then fear them for what they show us about ourselves.
My greatest pleasure is to invent. My continual mad ambition is to make something true and beautiful that never existed in the world before.
Nostalgia is something we think of as fuzzy. But it’s pain. Pain concerning the past.
One has to be able to twist and change and distort characters, play with them like clay, so everything fits together. Real people don’t permit you to do that.
So in the first draft, I’m inventing people and place with a broad schematic idea of what’s going to happen. In the process, of course, I discover all sorts of bigger and more substantial things.
Writers are always envious, mean-minded, filled with rage and envyat other’s good fortune. There is nothing like the failure of a close friend to cheer us up.
The great thing about using the past is that it gives you the most colossal freedom to invent. The research is necessary, of course, but no one writes a novel to dramatically illustrate what everybody already knows.
You could not tell a story like this. A story like this you could only feel.
I went to work in 1962, and by ’64 I was writing all the time, every night and every weekend. It didn’t occur to me that, having read nothing and knowing nothing, I was in no position to write a book.
Writers, at least writers of fiction, are always full of anxiety and worry.
All our heroes, all our great stories are about failure.
Swimming always cleans your soul.
I did not know that history is like a blood stain that keeps on showing on the wall no matter how many new owners take possession, no matter how many times we pint over it.
At the very end of a book I can manage to work for longer stretches, but mostly, making stuff up for three hours, that’s enough. I can’t do any more. At the end of the day I might tinker with my morning’s work and maybe write some again. But I think three hours is fine.
I don’t separate my books into historical novels and the rest. To me, they’re all made-up worlds, and both kinds are borne out of curiosity, some investigation into the past.
I don’t think you have the right to shout about other people’s private life.
I have written a memoir here and there, and that takes its own form of selfishness and courage. However, generally speaking, I have no interest in writing about my own life or intruding in the privacy of those around me.
I never base characters on real people. There are people who do that but I really don’t know how to do it.
I thought I would be an organic chemist. I went off to university, and when I couldn’t understand the chemistry lectures I decided that I would be a zoologist, because zoologists seemed like life-loving people.
I think it’s really boring, from the point of view of the novelist, to write about yourself. Tedious. But that’s very hard to explain to people who really don’t believe in the possibility of invention.