I never actually sought out an agent or a publishing house. A friend of mine named David Simmer got wind of what I was doing, and he sent one of my books to a literary lawyer in Los Angeles. He loved it, and he sent it to other people, including an agent, and he picked me up, and that's how 'Bird Box' got to where it is now.
Before MS moved in on me, I'd worked for seven years as a city lawyer, as the editor of a literary magazine, and before the age of 20, I'd also worked as a cadet journalist and as an assistant director in both film and TV. And then, after the lesions of MS, both on my spine and in my brain, I was the opposite of bionic.
After university, I got a job sub-editing and for years I was a literary editor.
When authors who write literary fiction begin to write screenplays, everybody assumes that's the end. Here's another who's never going to write well again.
I get sent a lot of scripts which feature him as a kind of all-purpose Victorian literary character and really understand little, if anything, about him, his life or his books.
I might have simply settled down into an armchair literary life. I really don't know exactly why I didn't.
New York offers a bubble out of the literary life that is very useful. We have more time for the children, for the cooking.
I began as a fiction writer - I had written three novels in my 20s and 30s. But as my work has gravitated towards literary nonfiction, or lyric essay or poetic essay, whatever you want to call it, I'm constantly beating my head against the wall 'cause I'm teaching a genre that's no longer that exciting to me and that I'm no longer practicing.
I think that the idea that I'm writing for many more people than I ever imagined has created a certain general responsibility that is literary and political. There's even pride involved, in not wanting to fall short of what I did before.
Close friends consider me a literary snob.
I have not written a perfect sentence, in the literary sense. It's a lot easier to throw a perfect pass than to write a perfect sentence, if that sentence is meant to perform more than a mechanical function.
I did not have a very literary background. I came to poetry from the sciences and mathematics, and also through an interest in Japanese and Chinese poetry in translation.
Poetry is the most subtle of the literary arts, and students grow more ingenious by the year at avoiding it. If they can nip around Milton, duck under Blake and collapse gratefully into the arms of Jane Austen, a lot of them will.
I wanted to avoid all that literary stuff. I didn't want the self pity of 'The Portrait,' all the moaning and the whingeing. I'm not knocking Joyce: we all owe him a debt. He's the one who made so much possible.
As in political so in literary action a man wins friends for himself mostly by the passion of his prejudices and the consistent narrowness of his outlook.
If a literary man puts together two words about music, one of them will be wrong.
I love developing children as characters. Children rarely have important roles in literary fiction - they are usually defined as cute or precious, or they create a plot by being kidnapped or dying.
Essayists, like poets, are born and not made, and for one worth remembering, the world is confronted with a hundred not worth reading. Your true essayist is, in a literary sense, the friend of everybody.
When I bought a collection of Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky, I returned home with a bright enthusiasm to begin the long march into the Russian soul. Though I've failed to read either man to completion, they both helped me to imagine that my fictional South Carolina was as vast a literary acreage as their Russia.
I did not win and in fact I was called into the principal's office for a consultation with my parents. But that was the beginning of my literary career.
Sex in a woman's world has the same currency a penny has in a man's. Every penny saved is a penny earned in one world and in the next every sexual adventure is a literary experience.
I don't write literary fiction - I write books that are entertaining, but are also, I hope, well-constructed and thoughtful and funny and have things to say about men and women and families and children and life in America today.
You have to remember that in addition to running a literary agency, I am also an ebook publisher.
In the summer of 1791, I gave up my concern in the 'New Annual Register,' the historical part of which I had written for seven years, and abdicated, I hope forever, the task of performing a literary labour, the nature of which should be dictated by anything but the promptings of my own mind.
Nebraska was home to indigenous peoples for centuries. It became a state in 1867, and has produced an important literary figure, Willa Cather, as well as an investor said to be the world's second richest man, Warren Buffett.
I dislike literary jargon and never use it. Criticism has only one function and that is to help readers read and understand literature. It is not a science, it is an aid to art.
At 20, 25, 30, we begin to realise that the possibilities of escape are getting fewer. We have jobs, children, partners, debts. This is the part of us to which literary fiction speaks.
Digital technology allows us a much larger scope to tell stories that were pretty much the grounds of the literary media.
Much literary criticism comes from people for whom extreme specialization is a cover for either grave cerebral inadequacy or terminal laziness, the latter being a much cherished aspect of academic freedom.
It became plain very soon after our marriage that ours was to be a literary partnership.
I use the language I use to my friends. They wouldn't believe me if I used some high-flown literary language. I want them to believe me.
The more you put out there, the more you have to resolve. 'Air' is the most literary comic I've written so far, and that poses problems.
There is far too much literary criticism of the wrong kind. That is why I never could have survived as an academic.
We had literary references, so we knew what we were talking about. We could quote things, talk about books we'd read; you can say something, you don't have to explain it.
The great break of my literary career was going to law school.
I was editor of my high school literary magazine and a reporter for the school newspaper.
