I used to believe that if I could do certain things - write a book or be a successful musician - that I'd be transformed into a happy person, but it doesn't work that way.
For English assignments I was constantly coming up with these strange adventure stories... But I actually wanted to be an artist, or maybe work in the comic book industry.
People always ask, 'How do you write so many books?' And I say, I work a lot. I work six or seven days a week.
When I'm writing a book, sentence by sentence, I'm not thinking theoretically. I'm just trying to work out the story from inside the characters I've got.
Writers have it easy. If you write a bestseller or have your book made into a movie, you'll never have to work again, or so the myth goes.
I think one of the blessings that I've had in watching, you know, films be made now from four of my books is to realize that it's a separate thing. It's a separate work.
I like writing. I get cranky when I can't. Yes, I write books back to back, and I work very hard on them.
So, I am independently well-off and don't have to do anything, but I still do. I write books, lecture around the world, work with scientists and governments.
What's important to me is that all of my books are in print - and, in a way, that becomes the challenge, not winning this prize or getting that review. It's that the work is there, and you can walk into many bookshops throughout the world and buy it.
Many of my books are written from a female perspective. I rather enjoy the take that women have on the world, and certainly I enjoy the conversations that women have.
Like many other women, I could not understand why every man who changed a diaper has felt impelled, in recent years, to write a book about it.
My recipes aren't geared towards women; my books are marketed towards women because women are the biggest market for weight loss, weight management and weight maintenance and for cooking.
Many women have told me they remember where they were when they read the book, and how they felt suddenly that what they really thought or felt about things made sense.
A book is not an example of 'women's writing' simply because it is written by a woman. Writing may become 'women's writing' when it could not have been written by a man.
I sell my first book to Random House, a memoir of my years as a war photographer, for twice my NBC salary.
The last time that I consciously wrote anything to 'save the honor of the Left', as I rather pompously put it, was my little book on the crookedness and cowardice and corruption (to put it no higher) of Clinton. I used leftist categories to measure h...
Cinderella was such a dork. She left behind her glass slipper at the ball and then went right back to her step-monster's house. It seems to me she should have worn the glass slipper always, to make herself easier to find. I always hoped that after th...
So while this is a book about fighting back, in the end this is a book about love. The songbirds and the salmon need your heart, no matter how weary, because even a broken heart is still made of love. They need your heart because they are disappearin...
It’s like Mark Twain once said to his wife, Olivia: “How many times do I have to say it—over the top!” He wasn’t talking about women being overly dramatic. He was in fact referring to the proper placement of toilet paper. And I agree to a c...
This book is not the memoir of a contented man. It's not the poignant reflections of a white-haired guru who has finally figured out the secret to contentment. It's more like sweaty, bloody, hastily scribbled notes from a battlefield. I'm still strug...
People talk about nightfall, or night falling, or dusk falling, and it’s never seemed right to me. Perhaps they once meant befalling. As in night befalls. As in night happens. Perhaps they, whoever they were, thought of a falling sun. That might be...
