I cordially dislike allegory in all its manifestations, and always have done so since I grew old and wary enough to detect its presence. I much prefer history – true or feigned– with its varied applicability to the thought and experience of readers. I think that many confuse applicability with allegory, but the one resides in the freedom of the reader, and the other in the purposed domination of the author.
my crime books are actually novels and are written as such. One might even say that each one is really two novels, one of which is the story I tell the reader, and the other the buried story I know and let slip now and then into a clue to whet the reader's interest.
'When I use a word,' Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, 'it means just what I choose it to mean - neither more nor less.'
Because, as we know, almost anything can be read into any book if you are determined enough. This will be especially impressed on anyone who has written fantastic fiction. He will find reviewers, both favourable and hostile, reading into his stories all manner of allegorical meanings which he never intended. (Some of the allegories thus imposed on my own books have been so ingenious and interesting that I often wish I had thought of them myself.)
The house of fiction has in short not one window, but a million, ... but they are, singly, as nothing without the posted presence of the watcher.
Vladimir Nabokov was a writer who cared nothing for music and whose favorite sport was the pursuit, capture, and murder of butterflies. This explains many things; for example, the fact that Nabokov's novels, for all their elegance and wit, resemble nothing so much as butterflies pinned to a board: pretty but dead; symmetrical but stiff.
There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written or badly written.
I write what I write.
Academics love to make theories about a body of work, but each book consumes the writer and is the sum of his or her world.
I've published a couple of short novels in France that I didn't want to publish in English because I loved the characters too much to subject them to American critics who were not exactly favorable toward my work.
Everything I've ever written, I had a very distinct vision of what I wanted it to look like. But, other directors never do it that way.
Writing is an act of faith, not a trick of grammar.
Adapting a novel is not really about being faithful to every word and every moment the author has created. It's more about that same story being filtered through somebody else's sensibility.
I have no interest in non-fiction. I don't read it and don't watch it and don't write it, other than a little journalistic column.
I'm not spitting in my own soup, I love having spent my life thinking about these things-but you don't have to know anything about his life, even though I've just written a biography!
An easy solution for many controversies may be found as long as we are able to be on our guard for the same words being used with conflicting meanings by different authors.
History will be kind to me, for I intend to write it.
I wrote the first draft of 'Madame Bovary' without studying the previous translations, although I gathered them and took the occasional peek.
Words mean more than we mean to express when we use them: so a whole book ought to mean a great deal more than the writer meant.
Although a novel takes place in the larger world, there's always some drive in it that is entirely personal - even if you don't know it while you're doing it.
I don't think we [with Kate DiCamillo] intended to write a book about friendship, I think we intended to write a book about two friends.
There are, first of all, two kinds of authors: those who write for the subject's sake, and those who write for writing's sake.
You're not going to make Hemingway better by adding animations.
When I lock myself up to write, I cannot allow myself to think about the censor or the reviewer or anyone but my characters and their story!
I went to an extreme for literary purposes because I felt all the self-help books out there were so gooey and Pollyanna-ish and nauseating. It was making me angry.
