Skip to Content

Comment from the book world in October 2015

« Prev  

October 2015

  Next »

Downton and late-life success

26 October 2015

‘The whole thing is so surprising, you could never make it work as a film. I was told today by friends who'd been to the Writers' Guild that there was a huge cheer when I'd won. Not because they knew me but because I had disproved the idea prevalent in Hollywood that if you've got it, by your mid-thirties it will have begun to manifest itself. I became the honorary president of the last-chance saloon...

Downton has been a big thing for me. It's been a worldwide sensation to a degree that is unknown in most careers. I consider myself lucky to have had one; I would be astonished if there was another.'

Julian Fellowes, creator and writer of Downton Abbey, in the Sunday Times

  • Share this

‘I feel as if I've been on the road for about 30 years...'

19 October 2015

‘I feel as if I've been on the road for about 30 years flogging around reading and going to schools and colleges. I can't count the number of times I've been on Wakefield station at six in the morning in order to go off and give a reading. It's something that I chose to do and see as part and parcel of the task of being a poet. But I was slightly thinking I would like to slow down a bit...

I think I've always written out of a sense of wonder. Someone in a review once said that I had a child's eye - which maybe sounds a bit disparaging, but I took it as a huge compliment. I have worried that there might come a time when the world starts looking regular, ordinary, completely understandable and that might mean the end of the poems - when I'm not astonished by ordinary things any more. Or, God forbid, if I start thinking of myself as being wise.'

Simon Armitage in the Sunday Times

'Treat every story like a crime scene.'

11 October 2015

'Read voraciously and read forensically, whether it's stories you admire or stories you detest. There is a lesson in every one, tricks to steal, potholes to avoid. Treat every story like a crime scene. Take it to pieces. How many adverbs are there? How much does the narrator know? How long are the sentences? How detailed is the description of the physical world..? Because those are precisely the questions you have to answer when you're writing yourself, and if you can't read with that kind of focus it will be impossible to write with that kind of focus.'

Mark Haddon, nominated for the 2015 BBC Short Story Award for Bunny.

I'd like to be the Puccini of fiction.

5 October 2015

‘Just because a book is classified by that dreaded term "women's commercial fiction" doesn't mean that it can't take a look at societal issues or address things which are going on in the world, whether it's extremes in wealth or opportunity, or what happens when you're working for a company that puts you on a zero hours contract. If I can make people think while also being accessible, and possibly make them laugh and cry a bit at the same time, then, frankly, I don't care what they call me. I'd like to be the Puccini of fiction. I'm unembarrassed by the joy of making people feel something...

... after seven books that didn't sell terribly well, you really do start to question whether yours are the books people actually want to read. And then Me Before You was such a success that people turned to the backlist - having those sales suddenly take off made me feel vindicated.'

Jojo Moyes, author of Me Before You and After You in the Observer