French novels generally treat of the relations of women to the world and to lovers after marriage consequently there is a great deal in French novels about adultery about improper relations between the sexes about many things which the English public would not allow.

I do have two data identities. I have my name Bruce Sterling which is my public name under which I write novels. I also have my other name which is my legal name under which I own property and vote.

The novel is about five students of classics who are studying with a classics professor and they take the ideas of the things that they're learning from him a bit too seriously with terrible consequences.

The biggest novelty of 2013 will be new leadership in China. Very little is known about the views of the new leaders - who will rule the country for ten years. But we do know they're the first generation of Chinese leaders who have spent the majority of their lives in a China 'opening up' to the rest of the world.

To remove this obstacle I repeat or refer to such knowledge as has come under my notice my own previously expressed views and also describe and exhibit my last experiments and explain their novelty and utility.

A novel that does not uncover a hitherto unknown segment of existence is immoral. Knowledge is the novel's only morality.

Heaven knows I've exposed myself in my novels through the use of fantasy and imagination... now my new book is about what really happened to me... not my heroines.

Writing a novel is not merely going on a shopping expedition across the border to an unreal land: it is hours and years spent in the factories the streets the cathedrals of the imagination.

I had been a reporter for 15 years when I set out to write my first novel. I knew how to research an article or profile a subject - skills that I assumed would be useless when it came to fiction. It was from my imagination that the characters in my story would emerge.

I suppose I'm proudest of my novels for what's imagined in them. I think the world of my imagination is a richer and more interesting place than my personal biography.

Novelists are not equipped to make a movie in my opinion. They make their own movie when they write: they're casting they're dressing the scene they're working out where the energy of the scene is coming from and they're also relying tremendously on the creative imagination of the reader.

Writing a novel is one of those modern rites of passage I think that lead us from an innocent world of contentment drunkenness and good humor to a state of chronic edginess and the perpetual scanning of bank statements.

In my opinion I think sarcasm and humor in a song without turning it into a novelty song is really charming.

A novelist is like all mortals more fully at home on the surface of the present than in the ooze of the past.

Asking the author of historical novels to teach you about history is like expecting the composer of a melody to provide answers about radio transmission.

Love is more pleasant than marriage for the same reason that novels are more amusing than history.

Historian: an unsuccessful novelist.

There is no happiness in love except at the end of an English novel.

I always seem to get inspiration and renewed vitality by contact with this great novel land of yours which sticks up out of the Atlantic.

I wrote a novel for my degree and I'm very happy I didn't submit that to a publisher. I sympathize with my professors who had to read it.

A good novel tells us the truth about its hero but a bad novel tells us the truth about its author.

It's with bad sentiments that one makes good novels.

The person be it gentleman or lady who has not pleasure in a good novel must be intolerably stupid.

Life is God's novel. Let him write it.