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.

Before I became a suspense novelist I wrote romantic suspense as Alicia Scott.

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.

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.

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

Historian: an unsuccessful novelist.

I believe in a funny way the job of the novelist is to be out there on the fringes and speaking for an experience that has not really been spoken for.

Novelists have always had complete freedom to pretty much tell their story any way they saw fit. And that's what I'm trying to do.

A filmmaker has almost the same freedom as a novelist has when he buys himself some paper.

As a novelist I tell stories and people give me money. Then financial planners tell me stories and I give them money.

My greatest fear is feeling like a professional novelist. Somebody who creates characters who sits down and has pieces of paper taped to the wall - what's going to happen in this scene or this act. What I like is for it to be a much more scary sloppy reflection of who I am.

As a novelist I mined my history my family and my memory but in a very specific way. Writing fiction I never made use of experiences immediately as they happened. I needed to let things fester in my memory mature and transmogrify into something meaningful.

The novelist teaches the reader to comprehend the world as a question. There is wisdom and tolerance in that attitude. In a world built on sacrosanct certainties the novel is dead.

I know that books I have written will still resonate in 50 years - particularly 'My Sister's Keeper.' It has sold three million copies in the States alone. I strongly feel that as a novelist you have a platform and the ability to change people's minds.