I am a novelist. I traffic in subtleties, and my goal in writing a novel is to leave the reader not knowing what to think. A good novel shouldn't have a point.

The theory of founder effects does not explain how novel features like plumage traits arise.

No... a novel is a long business. I'm a slow writer, even when I'm doing very well I write slowly.

By definition, outbreaks are quickly evolving situations. Outbreaks with novel diseases bring even more unknowns.

A novel is balanced between a few true impressions and the multitude of false ones that make up most of what we call life.

In a novel, I could submerge my ego in a character's and let his perceptions take over.

Themes only arise after a novel is written, and people begin to try to talk about it.

I do one Xanth novel a year, because at the moment that is all that publishers will accept; they don't want any other type of fiction from me, so Xanth pays my way.

Whatever I write, no matter how gray or dark the subject matter, it's still going to be a comic novel.

Originally I was going to write a fashion style guide, but then my publishers suggested I write a novel instead.

But the first published thing I did was a detective story, detective novel, and I did that on my own.

'The Cauliflower' is not strictly a novel, as Barker says in her indispensable afterword.

I seem to produce a novel approximately once every three years.

I have survived by representing these sufferings of mine in the form of the novel.

The financial markets tend to be just a backdrop for a novel, for a heist or something that isn't necessarily integral to it. On the whole, I don't think the financial world has been well served by...

I spend eight months outlining and researching the novel before I begin to write a single word of the prose.

'The Man in the High Castle' is still the best what-if-the-Axis-had-won novel.

The novel is just fine: It's novelists who aren't doing so well.

I wanted to write a novel. At 12 I knew, I am a writer. I said it to nobody.

When I read 'Maus,' I realized you could tell a story of tremendous import using the graphic novel.

'The Chimney Sweeper's Boy' began differently from any previous book I'd written. It actually derives from a story a friend - the novel's dedicatee, Patrick Maher - told me.

When writing a novel a writer should create living people; people not characters. A character is a caricature.