I was working for Time-Life Books from 1962 to 1970, as a staff writer, and after that, I was a journalist. Eventually, I became an editor at 'The Saturday Review' and 'Horizon.'
Early 2000s, we get Enron, which tells us the books are dirty. And what is our repeated response? We just keep pulling the threads out of the regulatory fabric.
I don't care where I live, so long as there's a roof to keep the rain off my books, and high-speed Internet access.
I try to do that in this book without preaching - to try to do as you just said that you really have to defend the First Amendment rights of everybody.
She liked books more than anything else, and was, in fact, always inventing stories of beautiful things and telling them to herself.
I loved reading Roald Dahl when I was young but I had forgotten a lot about the books. I read the 'BFG' on the iPad the other day and it was so interesting to see his descriptions of clothes and places.
I first began to read religious books at school, and especially the Bible, when I was eleven years old; and almost immediately commenced a habit of secret prayer.
The prime goal of censorship is to promote ignorance, whether it is done via lying and bowdlerized school texts or by attacking individual books.
People have no memory of phone numbers now because of the cell phone - their address book is in a cell phone.
The fact is, unlike a lot of writers, I credit the people who help me. A lot of writers out there have a ton of researchers and they don't get credited in the book.
A great book increases my heartbeat as if I’m prey, melts my insides in anticipation of a first kiss, immerses me in its depths.
I didn't know anything about '12 Years a Slave.' Not the book, not Solomon Northup, which I was quite shocked by, once I'd read it, that it wasn't a seminal text. I think it deserves to be.
…my books are derived from city images, and the city of my dreams or nightmares is Mexico City. (The Art of Fiction, No. 68. The Paris Review, No. 82, Winter 1981.)
I think the greatest reward you get as a writer is finding that people who are reasonably receptive and intelligent have liked your book.
The essays are very solipsistic and self-absorbed, I'm totally conscious of that. To me, book writing is fun, and I basically just write about things that are entertaining to myself.
Most people assume I write at night because of the kind of books I write, but I can shut out the light with my mind.
When self-publishing started, it was mostly people who really couldn't write. And they just wanted to get their book out, and they couldn't get traditional deals.
I call Algonquin Books 'the gods and goddesses of publishing.' Not only did they give me a career, they care deeply about every writer in their flock.
While some of the big publishers might give out 200,000 advances, if your book does not hit some of the lists in the second week, they stop paying attention to you.
Going out in Paris was like going out in the '30s dressed like the Andrews Sisters. It was everything I'd seen in books at my grandparents' house, only it was our generation.
Our experience is coloured through and through by books and plays and the cinema, and it takes patience and skill to disentangle the things we have really learned from life for ourselves.
