I was going to be a great woman novelist. Then the war came along and I think it's hard for young people today don't you to realize that when World War II happened we were dying to go and help our country.

A petty reason perhaps why novelists more and more try to keep a distance from journalists is that novelists are trying to write the truth and journalists are trying to write fiction.

There's a unique bond of trust between readers and authors that I don't believe exists in any other art form as a reader I trust a novelist to give me his or her best effort however flawed.

Mark Twain was a great traveler and he wrote three or four great travel books. I wouldn't say that I'm a travel novelist but rather a novelist who travels - and who uses travel as a background for finding stories of places.

The novelist must look on humanity without partiality or prejudice. His sympathy like that of the historian must be unbounded and untainted by sect or party.

I really think more fledgling novelists - and many current and even established novelists - should get out into the real world and cover local politics sports culture and crime and write it up on deadline.

Stories in which the destruction of society occurs are explorations of social fears and issues that filmmakers novelists playwrights painters have been examining for a long time.

I'm mostly a novelist these days but I have written short stories in Fantasy Science Fiction and horror.

I think that if the novel's task is to describe where we find ourselves and how we live now the novelist must take a good hard look at the most central facts of contemporary life - technology and science.

Although some people think I am a romantic novelist I have always thought of myself as a rather gritty radical historian.