The best novels capture the times in which the writer lives, which accounts for the current, if contrasting taste for lost utopias and dystopian nightmares peopled by vampires and wolves.

A novel is a long confession in which you expose your heartaches, complain about all the things that are wrong in the world, then try to put those things right for the sake of the reader, as well as your own well being.

Publishing a novel is often likened to having a baby. It is much worse to that. It is like giving birth to something with cloven hooves, a monster in a black and white mask. Characters must reveal a blend of good and bad qualities with distinguishing tics and mannerisms. It obliges the writer to clear the mist from the mirror to see who you really are in order to establish who they really are.

Writing a novel is like having a terrible illness. Every time you feel as if you are recovering, you have to start a new chapter, get over the setbacks endured by your heroine (you feel her pain) and set her up for more suffering. Conflict is the oil of fiction and in a romance, someone always needs a cuddle.

Novel-writing is not so much a profession as a yoga, or "way," an alternative to ordinary life-in-the-world. Its benefits are quasi-religious—a changed quality of mind and heart, satisfactions no non-novelist can understand—and its rigors generally bring no profit except to the spirit. For those who are authentically called to the profession, spiritual profits are enough.--John Gardner

The very qualities that make one a writer in the first place contribute to the block: hypersensitivity, stubbornness, insatiability, and so on. Given the general oddity of writers, no wonder there are no sure cures.

Theoretically there's no reason one should get [writer's block], if one understands that writing, after all, is only writing, neither something one ought to feel deeply guilty about nor something one ought to be inordinately proud of.

Laura thought Bell would have a few things to say to Pynchon. And Laura had a few things to say to Bell, like, How the hell was a writer supposed to know when she was one-fifth through her novel-writing, so she could cut a door into the wall and shove her character out into the forest?

Writing a novel is like traveling the universe on foot.

One Bagatelle, and I’ll raise you a novel,” Megan had tweeted back.“Writing for tea? Now that would have been a solution for the British empire,” Laura returned.“Writing for me,” Megan had typed.“I’ll write you a tea fortune.”“No deal. I want a novel. September sounds good.