If to live is to progress if you are lucky from foolishness to wisdom then to write novels is to broadcast the various stages of your foolishness.

Novels are the Socratic dialogues of our time. Practical wisdom fled from school wisdom into this liberal form.

I don't think you can tell the objective truth about a person. That's why people write novels.

I think of novels in architectural terms. You have to enter at the gate and this gate must be constructed in such a way that the reader has immediate confidence in the strength of the building.

Oh I'm nerdy about science fiction and fantasy and graphic novels and reading and I'm nerdy about board games. My favorite board game is a board game I'm working on right now. It's a game of Napoleonic era naval warfare and it's going to be fun.

As a kid I wanted to write science fiction and I was never without a book. Later I really got into being a scientist and never thought I'd be writing novels.

After these three novels I gave up writing novels for a time I was dissatisfied with romantic doom yet didn't see much way around it.

I bought a selection of short romantic fiction novels studied them decided that I had found a formula and then wrote a book that I figured was the perfect story. Thank goodness it was rejected.

I'm a feminist but I think that romance has been taken away a bit for my generation. I think what people connect with in novels is this idea of an overpowering encompassing love - and it being more important and special than anything and everything else.

I think the short story is a very underrated art form. We know that novels deserve respect.

People respect nonfiction but they read novels.

I'm not embarrassed about the novels I wrote when I was younger but I couldn't write them today because of my religion.

It's a luxury to be able to tell a long form story. I love novels and I love to have a long relationship with characters.

I don't think the relationship between novels and realities are one to one. Of course novels play different roles. It's essentially just a long narrative form. What you use that long narrative form for can be very different.

We don't tend to write about disease in fiction - not just teen novels but all American novels - because it doesn't fit in with our idea of the heroic romantic epic. There is room only for sacrifice heroism war politics and family struggle.

I believe that the short story is as different a form from the novel as poetry is and the best stories seem to me to be perhaps closer in spirit to poetry than to novels.

And I know I'm supposed to feel guilty for wanting people to buy my books... and books in general? Novels and poetry they belong to the realm of art. How dirty of us to try to hawk art! But after a decade of hand-wringing and apologies I can't quite muster the guilt anymore.