I don't necessarily read everything. I read what I need to read to inspire the book I'm trying to finish.
I believe I belong to the last literary generation, the last generation, that is, for whom books are a religion.
A dreary censorship, and self-censorship, has been imposed on books by the centralization of the book industry.
All authors know that any book is a casting of runes, a reading of cards, a map of the palm and heart. We make up the ocean - then fall in. But we also write the life raft.
Home is where your books are.
It is the nature of those books we call classics to wait patiently on the shelf for us to grow into them.
A book is a box brimming with incendiary material. The reader strikes the match.
I write slowly by hand. Publishing is effectively bankrupt for you unless you are Danielle Steele. It takes a year to write book and advances are going down or disappearing.
Women's books are kind of discriminated against. If a man writes a book about his family stories, people think of it as literature. If it's a woman, she's 'spilling her guts,' and it's not art.
The only difference between men and women is that women are able to create new little human beings in their bodies while simultaneously writing books, driving tractors, working in offices, planting crops - in general, doing everything men do.
Books go out into the world, travel mysteriously from hand to hand, and somehow find their way to the people who need them at the times when they need them ... Cosmic forces guide such passings-along.
The aim of my writing is to utterly remove the distance between author and reader so that the book becomes a sort of semipermeable membrane through which feelings, ideas, nutrients pass ...
A book burrows into your life in a very profound way because the experience of reading is not passive.
As a reader, I want a book to kidnap me into its world. Its world must make my so-called real world seem flimsy. Its world must lure me to return. When I close the book, I should feel bereft.
I stand in the mist and cry, thinking of myself standing in the mist and crying, and wondering if I will ever be able to use this experience in a book.
The hardest part is believing in yourself at the notebook stage. It is like believing in dreams in the morning.