Novel Series Quotes

When a young writer comes up to me with an ambitious idea for a 20-book series, I usually tell him to maybe try something smaller to start off with.

'The Mortal Instruments' is based on a series of novels by Cassandra Clare; it has been a New York Times bestseller, so it is pretty popular.

Memnoch the Devil happen to be my favorite of all The Vampire Chronicles.

I wrote seven Myron Bolitar novels in a row, and I never want to write a Myron book where he just solves a crime. Every one of them I want to be personal, and I want him to grow and change. The problem with that is, it makes the series limited, you can't write a series where a guy is always going through some kind of crisis.

Writing 'Book 1: The Maze of Bones' didn't feel much different than writing one of my other novels, but I thought it was very innovative to offer the website and trading card components as well for those readers who wanted to go more in depth with the Cahill experience.

For me, Anthony Powell is a religion. I read 'A Dance to the Music of Time' every few years.

I'm a firm believer in stories with arcs and beginnings and endings and all that. 'Scott Pilgrim' is sort of one long novel, and it's so long that I get confused and sort of tread water sometimes. But there's definitely a goal to it. People who just dismiss it as shallow, that's their prerogative, but it's not really my intent.

Like most writers, I look back on all of my finished works with utter regret, and the trouble with writing a series of novels is that you have to go back and read them, and make sure that you haven't forgotten anything you've created, and then when you do that, you're faced with your own mistakes on every trick, from the wrong word in places to entirely the wrong incident.

I've just finished a series of Olivia Manning novels. She's best known for two trilogies: Balkan Trilogy and Levant Trilogy. The six novels are continuous and contain the same set of characters. They are based on Manning's experiences in Eastern Europe and Egypt during the Second World War. Each novel is a wonderful picture of the peculiar British expatriate culture and what was happening during the war. She's one of those brilliant women who write very well about domestic relationships. All the books are slim, and it's easy to gallop through them.

At one point I intended to write precursor and sequel novels, about the establishment of the Web and its next evolution, but I am very unlikely to now; they would take place in a different universe.

My first book deal was for two Mark Genevich novels. I hadn't planned on writing a second Genevich novel, but I was contracted to do so, and so there I was being introduced as a crime writer.

I've written some standalone novels, but a book series allows fans in. There's much more intense involvement.

Six books after the surprises of 'Full Dark House,' the Bryant and May novels continue to stay within the bounds of formula by straining against them in new ways.

Serial novels have an unexpected effect; they hook the writer as well as the reader.

I had no idea Savage Season was the beginning of a series. I wrote the second one about three years later. The character of Hap wouldn't stop talking to me, and then there was a third, and over the years nine novels and a collection of stories and some uncollected stories.

It's a very 18th-century thing to have a book broken into several volumes.

I was very fortunate that my first novel captivated the imaginations of so many readers who asked for a sequel. After that, one book led to another as I discovered other facets to my characters I wanted to investigate further.

Actually, the 14 novels were written over a period of just over 6 years.

Whether early or late, the Parker novels are all superlative literary entertainments.

My whole reputation and creative thought as a novelist is really wrapped around Harry Bosch, so he's near and dear.

There are nineteen Harry Bosch books, and someone told me if you add up the descriptions of Harry from all of them, it would come to less than three pages. He's very elliptically described over the two decades during which the novels occur. I did that by intention.

My history is that I will create a character, and they will have a book to themselves, and then I'll integrate the character into the larger world of all my books.

In some ways, I don't consider a single Hap and Leonard novel the best, but I consider them my best characters.

There is a disconnect between the film Bond and the literary Bond which is their contemporaneity. I don't suffer from that.

'A Storm of Swords' is a massive volume, and it seemed like it would be shortchanging it to try to cram it into ten episodes.