After President Obama took office, his campaign book 'The Audacity of Hope' receded into his past fast. Its sweet, naive, bipartisan 'let's reason together' passages fell away, too.
At the end of the day, I'm just trying to write a song that I like, that I'm not afraid to turn loose on the world. I do read a lot. I know a lot of people who read more, but I do try to keep a book in my hand most of the time, and I think that informs any kind of output that I'm going to have.
I think a writer's job is to provoke questions. I like to think that if someone's read a book of mine, they've had - I don't know what - the literary equivalent of a shower. Something that would start them thinking in a slightly different way, perhaps. That's what I think writers are for.
It's almost like an optical illusion, 'The Hobbit.' You look at the book, and it is really thin, and you could make a relatively thin film as well. What I mean by that is that you could race through the story at the speed that Tolkien does.
Concrete poets continue to turn out beautiful things, but to me they're more visual than oral, and they almost really belong on the wall rather than in a book. I haven't the least idea of where poetry is going.
In my head, I'd love to go on a vacation to somewhere exotic and far away and in the middle of nowhere. But then I think about the effort it would take to book a flight and a hotel, etc., and I just end up staycationing.
I've heard people have written books of me. People don't even know me, but they've written a book on me. You ever heard of hearing it from the horse's mouth? I'm the horse.
I've worked very hard in this book to keep the lines of communication open. I don't want to turn someone away from this information for partisan political reasons.
In the world of book writing, an author really gets to have control over what he or she writes, which is why it is very satisfying. With the help of a great compatible editor, you really have something in the end you can call your own.
Each book will have a lot of cliffhangers, because I like that.
To put away one's own original thoughts in order to take up a book is a sin against the Holy Ghost.
I was really the first-line editor of the 'House of Night' series. I didn't write that much of the story, and I didn't know what was happening until my mom finished the book and sent it to me because I wanted to read it with fresh eyes as a general reader would.
Second novels are bears. As are other people's expectations for them. I think taking the time you need with the second book is key. Writers spend years and years on their first novels and then are often expected to turn out a second at warp speed, a recipe for failure.
I think people become consumed with selling a book when they need to be consumed with writing it.
I read The Old Curiosity Shop before I began Blackwood Farm. I was amazed at the utter madness in that book.
It had to be a book that held my attention and kept me wanting to read it; when my husband finished 'The Road', I started it straight away and didn't put it down until I finished - it was such an achievement and relief to know that I could read, comprehend and, most importantly, enjoy a book!
If I don't book a job, I like to see it not as a rejection but as a redirection to something different.
The two things I was positive about in life were that I was going to be a teacher at a boarding school or an operative with the CIA posted abroad. I could write a book about all the things I was sure about.
You know, I'm trying to sometimes sit down and write some stories about my childhood and maybe one when I'm an old lady put them out like a book.
People don't like it when you compare the miracle of childbirth to writing a book, but I think there is some overlap in the two because they are both pure agony.
Unless any book is selling 30 million copies, like 'Fifty Shades of Grey' did, the big studios are not going to make movies out of them because the cost is too high.
I've had people turn up to book signings with knives, with guns.
Books are something social - a writer speaking to a reader - so I think making the reading of a book the center of a social event, the meeting of a book club, is a brilliant idea.
A writer is, after all, only half his book. The other half is the reader and from the reader the writer learns.
A book, like a landscape, is a state of consciousness varying with readers.
The shelf life of the average trade book is somewhere between milk and yogurt.
A book is simply the container of an idea like a bottle; what is inside the book is what matters.
Of course it is very limiting to be labeled a lesbian or queer writer. We live in a homophobic culture, and even people who aren't hateful per se assume they won't get anything from a queer book.
I can't bear art that you can walk round and admire. A book should be either a bandit or a rebel or a man in the crowd.
I have zero desire, just so you know, to be in the limelight. I don't think it's good for the country to have a former president criticize his successor. You're not going to see me giving my opinions in the public arena, until I start selling my book. I'm going to emerge then submerge.
When I wrote my book I wanted to love someone. I wanted to be in love. Now I know that I shall never be in love - and I no longer wish to be.
One's head is finite. You pour more and more things into it - surnames, chronologies, affiliations - and it packs them away in its tunnels, and eventually you find that you have a book about something that you publish.
When I am working on a book or a story, I write every morning as soon after first light as possible. There is no one to disturb you, and it is cool or cold, and you come to your work and warm as you write.
As long as a film stays unmade, the book is entirely yours, it belongs to the writer. As soon as you make it into a film, suddenly more people see it than have ever read the book.
I'm writing a book and working on my one-woman show, Learning To Be Human.
What's funny about Jesus' Son is that I never even wrote that book, I just wrote it down. I would tell these stories and people would say, You should write these things down.
