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.

Poetry always runs away from you - it's very difficult to grasp it and every time you read it depending on your conditions you will have a different grasp of it. Whereas with a novel once you have read it you have grasped it.

I know I'm not a wordsmith. And I don't write poetry. Sometimes I think I should because it's really helpful. But I always wanted to write novels.

Narrative art the novel from Murasaki to Proust has produced great works of poetry.

As an actor there is room for a certain amount of creativity but you're always ultimately going to be saying somebody else's words. I don't think I'd have the stamina skill or ability to write a novel but I'd love to write short stories and poetry because those are my two passions.

Everyone thinks they're going to write one book of poems or one novel.

The novel is born of disillusionment the poem of despair.

Reading a novel in which all characters illustrate patience hard work chastity and delayed gratification could be a pretty dull experience.

To make a love story you need a couple of young people but to reflect on the nature of love you're better off with old ones. That is a fact of life and literature - and of the novel ever since it fell in love with love in the 18th century.

I've never written a movie I'm not in the movie business. I go out to L.A. and I'm like everyone else wandering around in a daze hoping I see movie stars. I write the novels that the movies are based on and that feels like enough of a job for me.

Movies have to handle time very efficiently. They're about stringing scenes together in the present. Novels aren't necessarily about that.

The novel succeeds on terms exclusive to literature. A good film succeeds on terms exclusive to the cinema. That's why so many bad novels can become good movies like 'Jaws' or 'The Godfather.'

I love the movies and when I go to see a movie that's been made from one of my books I know that it isn't going to be exactly like my novel because a lot of other people have interpreted it. But I also know it has an idea that I'll like because that idea occurred to me and I spent a year or a year and a half of my life working on it.

For the first-time novelist you've got to get up at 5:30 in the morning and write until 7 make breakfast and go to work. Or come home and work for an hour. Everybody has an hour in their day somewhere.

I'm a morning person because I learned to write my novels while still practicing law. I would get to the office at 6:30 a.m. and write until other people arrived around 9. Now I still do that. I start at 6:30 or 7 and I'll write until 11 then take an hour off then work until about 2 p.m. By then my brain has had enough.

I started writing morning pages just to keep my hand in you know just because I was a writer and I didn't know what else to do but write. And then one day as I was writing a character came sort of strolling in and I realized Oh my God I don't have to be just a screenwriter. I can write novels.

I've found myself at one in the morning just sitting at my desk spending an hour returning emails from the day until like two in the morning. It's ridiculous I should be sleeping or dreaming or reading a novel.

What I couldn't help noticing was that I learned more about the novel in a morning by trying to write a page of one than I'd learned in seven years or so of trying to write criticism.

I think the worst and most insidious procrastination for me is research. I will be looking for some bit of fact or figure to include in the novel and before I know I've wasted an entire morning delving into that subject matter without a word written.

Nothing induces me to read a novel except when I have to make money by writing about it. I detest them.

Women thrive on novelty and are easy meat for the commerce of fashion. Men prefer old pipes and torn jackets.

In our own state we came up with I think what was a very novel approach to closing the gap on the uninsured. To harmonize medical records - which was a major step in getting costs out of the system.

I have written two medical novels. I have never studied medicine never seen an operation.