Occupation: Novelist Birth: May 7, 1943
At the very end of a book I can manage to work for longer stretches, but mostly, making stuff up for three hours, that's enough. I can't do any more.….
I have written a memoir here and there, and that takes its own form of selfishness and courage. However, generally speaking, I have no interest in wr….
The great thing about using the past is that it gives you the most colossal freedom to invent. The research is necessary, of course, but no one write….
Then I fell in love and everything went to hell..
If you ever read one of my books I hope you'll think it looks so easy. In fact, I wrote those chapters 20 times over, and over, and over, and that if….
So in the first draft, I'm inventing people and place with a broad schematic idea of what's going to happen. In the process, of course, I discover al….
I don't separate my books into historical novels and the rest. To me, they're all made-up worlds, and both kinds are borne out of curiosity, some inv….
I had known loneliness before, and emptiness upon the moor, but I had never been a NOTHING, a nothing floating on a nothing, known by nothing, loneli….
I went to work in 1962, and by '64 I was writing all the time, every night and every weekend. It didn't occur to me that, having read nothing and kno….
I think that thing about the destruction of the world is there all the time, it's there every day when we look out the window..
I'm always the one with the activist friends. I've been an activist very little..
You could not tell a story like this. A story like this you could only feel..
I have never begun a novel which wasn't going to stretch me further than I had ever stretched before..
One has to be able to twist and change and distort characters, play with them like clay, so everything fits together. Real people don't permit you to….
I never base characters on real people. There are people who do that but I really don't know how to do it..
I think it's really boring, from the point of view of the novelist, to write about yourself. Tedious. But that's very hard to explain to people who r….
And it's always possible that you will not get a nice review. So - and that's enraging of course, to get a bad review, you can't talk back, and it's ….
All our heroes, all our great stories are about failure..
What I find really attractive is something that's going to be a little dangerous. Something that might get me into trouble; you know, you turn up in ….