Every kind of book I've written has been written in a different way. There has not been any set time for writing, any set way, I haven't re-invented the process every time but I almost have.
I try to keep each different book different from the last. So 'Sag Harbor' is very different from 'Apex Hides the Hurt;' 'The Intuitionist,' which is kind of a detective novel, is very different from 'John Henry Days.' I'm just trying to keep things rich for me creatively and for the readers who follow me.
I was raised in Harlem. I never found a book that took place in Harlem. I never had a church like mine in a book. I never had people like the people I knew. People who could not find their lives in books and celebrated felt bad about themselves. I needed to write to include the lives of these young people.
In a mood of faith and hope my work goes on. A ream of fresh paper lies on my desk waiting for the next book. I am a writer and I take up my pen to write.
I thought I'd write one book and the world would change overnight.
I'm in the middle of a 25-city book tour, and I like watching what people buy in bookstores. I see people buy books that I strongly suspect they will never read, and as an author, I must tell you, I don't mind this one bit. We buy books aspirationally.
A library book, I imagine, is a happy book.
For a true writer, each book should be a new beginning where he tries again for something that is beyond attainment. He should always try for something that has never been done or that others have tried and failed. Then sometimes, with great luck, he will succeed.
Dreams are illustrations from the book your soul is writing about you.
First of all there is always that artistic challenge of creating something. Or the particular experience to take slum life in that period and make something out of it in the form of a book. And then I felt some kind of responsibility to my family.
If a man could give birth it would be to a book - it's an 18-month gestation period.
I do, in fact, have a book club. I meet with a couple of guys once a month of a lunchtime discussion of some interesting text, usually, but not always, philosophical.
But, you know, I just did a big trip in the spring to Vietnam and Cambodia and Thailand, and that's when I bought a Kindle. I have like 15 books on this one little gizmo. But when I came home, the first night I picked up the book that was on my nightstand and I went right back to that.
A good-humored wife who appreciates most, if not all, of my humor - her price is far above rubies, as the book of Proverbs doesn't quite say.
Every book that you pick up takes you a step away from your real world, but if you read a book about magic, it takes you an extra two steps.
'What is the use of a book', thought Alice, 'without pictures or conversations?'
Yes, but another writer I read in high school who just knocked me out was Theodore Dreiser. I read An American Tragedy all in one weekend and couldn't put it down - I locked myself in my room. Now that was antithetical to every other book I was reading at the time because Dreiser really had no style, but it was powerful.
Then years back, when I moved to California, I happened to see a book about fashions of 19th-century Victorian England, only four pages of which was devoted to the dress of the working class.
If pregnancy were a book they would cut the last two chapters.
Winning the Pulitzer is wonderful and it's an honor and I feel so humbled and so grateful, but I think that I'll think of it very much as the final sort of final moment for this book and put it behind me along with the rest of the book, as I write more books.
Quite often I can be in a bookshop, standing beneath a great big picture of myself and paying for a book with a credit card clearly marked John Grisham, yet no one recognises me. I often say I'm a famous author in a country where no one reads.
Fifty years from now I'll be just three inches of type in a record book.
I never planned on doing a book about Paul Farmer or his organization. I met him in Haiti when I was on a magazine assignment. It's almost like his story sort of fell in my lap.
Freedom and confidence are two different things, in my book. Confidence is overrated - it can be faked, whereas freedom is fearlessness.
A book that is shut is but a block.
I've often described my book 'Anno Dracula' as 'literally, a vampire novel' - in that it battens on to other novels and sucks their lifeblood, transforming as well as feeding off them.
After an author has been dead for some time, it becomes increasingly difficult for his publishers to get a new book out of him each year.
A person who publishes a book willfully appears before the populace with his pants down. If it is a good book nothing can hurt him. If it is a bad book nothing can help him.
When you fall in love with a book, something especially interesting and exciting is happening because of the way language works on us as human beings. And I love language.
I didn't want to write a book as Stephen King's son, because all I did was get born, and that's not much of an accomplishment. If that was the reason my book was published, it wouldn't be worth the paper it was printed on. I wanted to do my own thing.
I have a short attention span, so when one book isn't working out, I just work on another.
We came to say, the Quran is our constitution, we are committed to God and his holy book. God willing, should they try to carry out their crime against the Quran, God will tear their state apart and they will become God's lesson to anyone who tries to desecrate the holy book.
There are three reasons why this book came into being. First, throughout the 33 years I've been writing recipes - although I'm not vegetarian myself - I have greatly enjoyed creating vegetarian recipes, and cooking and serving them at home.
Readers really want to come back to an author; they do not want a one-book wonder. That is all very well, but to be career author, you have to be prepared to write one really good book and then write another really good book and keep feeding your readers. You build your audience over a long time.
Genuine polemics approach a book as lovingly as a cannibal spices a baby.
Like pretty much every short story writer, I submitted to every market under the sun and hoped for the best. The rejection letters I've collected over the years can probably make a book of their own.
