The first thing I did when I sold my book was buy a new wedding ring for my wife and asked her to marry me all over again.
I wanted to define the vocabulary of a wedding both visually and intellectually. The book is about more than weddings or wedding dresses. It's a metaphor for women's lives, their creativity.
I think I'm a pretty open book. We're all a work in progress, and I'm not ashamed to say that I don't have it all together - I don't really think anyone does.
I was taught that in this country if you work hard, you can do anything, and I don't see a lot of those principles in children's books today.
In my second year in Los Angeles, when I was eighteen, I wasn't getting any bookings, so I stopped going out, stopped partying. It was a matter of getting to the work. I had to focus.
I'm an enormous fan of Thomas Bernhard's books, and I like the relentless feeling in his work - the pursuit of darkness, the negative - and I think in some sense I've internalised that as what one is supposed to do.
If I'm in a state about a book, I'll get up at 6 A.M. and write before breakfast, but usually I'll start afterwards and then work a full day with a break for lunch.
I receive about 10,000 letters a year from readers, and in the first year after a book is published, perhaps 5,000 letters will deal specifically with that piece of work.
I work for two years on a book and it comes out and two days later I've got my first e-mail: When is the next one coming out?
Fashion is a very stressful place to work because of the demands of doing the shows - no one expects a writer to produce two books a year on the dot - but it's also a very toxic place to work.
I wrote 'Sophie's World' in three months, but I was only writing and sleeping. I work for 14 hours a day when I'm working on a book.
I never take any notes or draw charts or make elaborate diagrams, but I hold an image of the shape of a book in my head and work from that mental hologram.
What are people going to do? Fire me? I've been fired before. Not book me? I've been out of work before. I don't care.
What I think happens, and that you have to acknowledge though, is that a director uses a book as a launching pad for his own work and that's always very flattering.
I research the role, and if it's a literary character, I read the book, and if it's an historical figure, I research documents and biographies. If it's a fictional character, I work off the script.
I have an idea for a story, and if the idea is going to work, then one of the characters steps forward, and I hear her voice telling the story. This is what has happened with all the books I've written in the first person.
I always work from an outline, so I know all the of the broad events and some of the finer details before I begin writing the book.
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.
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.
