I discovered Einstein said the same thing about his celebrated theories of relativity that writers say about their work when he said he didn't have any feelings of personal possession of these ideas. Once they were out there, they came from somewhere else. And that's exactly the feeling when you write. You don't feel possessive about it.
Obama is a great man who's just beginning to understand the realities. And I'm not just saying that because he reads my books. I would have voted for him anyway.
When I'm writing, I like to seal everything off and face the wall, not to look outside the window. The only way out is through the sentences.
In the twentieth century one of the most personal relationships to have developed is that of the person and the state. It's become a fact of life that governments have become very intimate with people, most always to their detriment.
Each book tends to have its own identity rather than the author's. It speaks from itself rather than you. Each book is unlike the others because you are not bringing the same voice to every book. I think that keeps you alive as a writer.
Here's how it goes: I'm up at the stroke of 10 or 10:30. I have breakfast and read the papers, and then it's lunchtime. Then maybe a little nap after lunch and out to the gym, and before I know it, it's time to have a drink.
I started on computers with 'Billy Bathgate,' a little orange screen with black letters. I thought it was really cool, but it actually slowed me up for a while because it's so easy to revise, I tended to stay on the same page. I've learned to discipline myself.
Writers are not just people who sit down and write. They hazard themselves. Every time you compose a book your composition of yourself is at stake.
Planning to write is not writing. Outlining, researching, talking to people about what you're doing, none of that is writing. Writing is writing.
I try to avoid experience if I can. Most experience is bad.
I thought I would lose, so I didn't prepare a speech.
I can walk into a bookstore and hand over my credit card and they don't know who the hell I am. Maybe that says something about bookstore clerks.
One of the things I had to learn as a writer was to trust the act of writing. To put myself in the position of writing to find out what I was writing.
A new reader shouldn't be able to find you in your work, though someone who's read more may begin to.
I'm not the sort of writer who can walk into a party and take a look around, see who's sleeping with whom and go home and write a novel about society. It's not the way I work.
A period of time is as much an organising principle for a work of fiction as a sense of place. You can do geography, as Faulkner did, or you can dwell on a particular period. It provides the same framework.
Things that appear on the front page of the newspaper as 'fact' are far more dangerous than the games played by a novelist, and can lead to wars.
I did have a feeling then that the culture of factuality was so dominating that storytelling had lost all its authority.
When you're working well, you don't do research. Whatever you need comes to you.
Movies are too literal.
