Novelist as a Vocation: The master storyteller on writing and creativity

Living is (in most cases) a tiresome, lackadaisical, protracted battle. If you don’t make the effort to persist in pushing the body forward, then keeping a firm, positive hold over your will and soul becomes, in my opinion, realistically next to impossible.

When I think about it, I realize that the novels I enjoy most are the ones with lots of fascinating supporting characters. The one that leaps to mind is Dostoevsky’s Demons. If you’ve read it, you know what I mean; there are plenty of oddball minor characters throughout the novel. It’s a long novel but holds my interest to the end.

Life isn’t that easy. If you tilt toward one direction or the other, sooner or later the opposite side will have its revenge. The scales tilting toward one side will inescapably return to where they were. Physical strength and spiritual strength are like the two pairs of wheels of a car. When they’re in balance and are functioning well, then the ca

if you’re not (sad to say) a rare genius, and you wish to, gradually, over time, raise the level of the (more or less limited) talent you do have, and make it into something powerful, I believe my theory might be of some value. You toughen up your will as much as you can. And at the same time you equip and maintain the headquarters of that will, yo

over a long period of time I think I’ve constructed a system whereby readers and myself are connected by a stout pipeline that allows us to communicate. This is a system in which the media and the literary industry aren’t needed much as an intermediary. What’s needed most there is a natural, spontaneous sense of trust between author and readers.

good luck is, so to speak, simply an admission ticket. In that sense it’s different from an oil field or a mine. Just getting that admission ticket is no guarantee that everything will be okay after that, that you can then live a life of ease and luxury. The admission ticket allows you into the performance—but that’s all. You hand over your admissi

If you always see things from your own standpoint, the world shrinks. Your body gets stiff, your footwork grows heavy, and you can no longer move. But if you’re able to view where you’re standing from other perspectives—to put it another way, if you can entrust your existence to some other system—the world will grow more three-dimensional, more sup

I hope to be “original” in my expression, just as I imagine all artists do. As I have already explained, however, it’s not something I myself can determine. However loudly I proclaim it from the rooftops, however often I am praised for it by the critics and the media, our voices are fated to vanish in the wind. All I can do is entrust the final dec

I can’t play a musical instrument. Or at least I can’t play one well enough to expect people to listen to me. Yet I have the strong desire to perform music. From the beginning, therefore, my intention was to write as if I were playing an instrument. I still feel like that today. I sit tapping away at the keyboard searching for the right rhythm, the