A novelist is a man who doesn't like his mother.
You live vicariously through your characters.
When you have a book out, it's like a period of protracted or concentrated megalomania, and it's really not normal or good for you or any of that.
I think it's a little simplistic to explain a work through the psychology of its author. In other words, that Haneke has emotional problems, so I don't have to take his films seriously. By using this argument, the viewer retreats from the challenges of the film.
I think as an author every character ends up low-key being some kind of self-insert.
I found the success of 'In a Dark, Dark Wood' really distracting when I was writing 'The Woman in Cabin 10,' but in a way, the fact that 'Cabin 10' was doing well felt quite freeing while I was writing 'The Lying Game.'
Hemingway's minimalism is based on the psychological mechanics of repression. An echo of his approach can be detected in a favorite trope of 1980s minimalists: a pattern of reference to dire secrets and hidden wounds these authors didn't realize they were supposed to have imagined.
Writers are frequently asked why they wrote their first book. A more interesting answer might come from asking them why they wrote their second one.
Every author, however modest, keeps a most outrageous vanity chained like a madman in the padded cell of his breast.
Call me territorial or narcissistic, but I avoid novels about people who share my vocation.
I think many people would say that writers like Stephen King have hypergraphia.
I sublimate different parts of my personality through my characters. Which is worrying, as some of them can be a bit nasty. I'm pleased the stuff on the page isn't inside me any more.
Authors who moan with praise for their editors always seem to reek slightly of the Stockholm syndrome.
Only a person with a Best Seller mind can write Best Sellers.
I think of myself as a very lazy author.
I suspect that most authors don't really want criticism, not even constructive criticism. They want straight-out, unabashed, unashamed, fulsome, informed, naked praise, arriving by the shipload every fifteen minutes or so.
I have always thought, the secret purpose of the book tour is to make the writer hate the book he's written. And, as a result, drive him to write another book.
I've heard stories about authors filled with this kind of Lotto-winner hubris. I'm a Dutch boy from the Midwest. We don't have hubris.
I am looking for the novelists whose writing is an extension of their intellect rather than an extension of their neurosis.
As a novelist, I tend to know significantly more about my characters than I do about my friends.
I have a huge emotional attachment to characters I've created, especially the viewpoint characters.
An author values a compliment even when it comes from a source of doubtful competency.
There must be a connection between the lust for power and impotentia coeundi. I liked Marx, I was sure that he and his Jenny had made love merrily. You can feel it in the easy pace of his prose and in his humor. On the other hand, I remember remarking one day in the corridors of the university that if you screwed Krupskaya all the time, you'd end up writing a lousy book like Materialism and Empiriocriticism.
I do mourn my characters. I wrote an essay once where I was sure that far back in a marsh there was a hummock - a little hill of hardwoods - and an old farm house, where all the heroines in my novels lived together with all my beloved dead dogs. I've discussed this with my therapist, naturally. He says it's okay in fair amounts.
Fiction always reveals a lot about the person who is writing it. That's the scary thing. Not in a straightforward autobiographical sense. But the flaws in a piece of fiction are, unhappily, so often also the flaws of the writer.
