We all now tell stories by cutting from one dramatic scene to the next, whereas Victorian novelists felt free to write long passages of undramatic summary. ↗
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. ↗
If you are a novelist of a certain type of temperament, then what you really want to do is re-invent the world. God wasn't too bad a novelist, except he was a Realist. ↗
With the marketing pressures driving the book world today, it's much easier to get the author of a memoir on a television show than a serious novelist. ↗
One of the admirable features of British novelists is that they have no scruple about setting their stories in foreign settings with wholly foreign personnel. ↗
I think it's also the case that I'm not as widely travelled, or as well-educated in history, as most of the other novelists I meet: so I have to write about my own country, at the present time, because it's more or less all I know about! ↗