When I'm doing interviews, I'm doing interviews, and when I am writing, I'm writing. I sit there with a musician and I write. It's the same process since I started writing in my twenties. I like to come in and leave with a finished song.
Any project that you shoot, it's never going to be completely finished the way that... I don't think I've ever worked on anything where every scene has been kept in the order that it was originally in, or that it hasn't been cut down in some way.
I was deliciously happy filming 'True Blood.' I even kept all the scripts in my office, which I never do with any script. Although I did shred them all in one go when the series finished; it seemed like a ritual, somehow.
I have no real ambition or strategy. If this was all to finish, it's totally fine. There's a lot more to do out there than put on silly frocks and shout for a living. I could always go back to, 'Would you like soup with that?'
The night before I began my career as a presidential campaign reporter, in September 2007, I finished Theodore White's 'The Making of the President,' the classic account of the 1960 race, which opened up a new era of campaign reporting.
I remember that the day I finished 'The Angels,' part three of 'The Book of Laughter and Forgetting', I was terribly proud of myself. I was sure that I had discovered the key to a new way of putting together a narrative.
When I look back over my novels what I find is that when I think I'm finished with a theme, I'm generally not. And usually themes will recur from novel to novel in odd, new guises.
Four months after we finished shooting, I'd been in New Orleans shooting another movie and my agent and I were having a bite to eat - actually in London - and he's sitting there and goes, 'Wow, I just can't believe how ripped you are.'
I've just had the opportunity to see the finished film of 'The Hunger Games.' I'm really happy with how it turned out. I feel like the book and the film are individual yet complementary pieces that enhance one another.
The oceans never stop. They know no beginning or end. The wind never finishes. Sometimes it disappears, but only to gather momentum from somewhere else, returning to fling itself at the island, to make a point which is lost on Tom.
The main objective in any song, the songs that I write, has always been that it reflect the way I feel, that it touch me when I'm finished with it, that it moves me, that it can take me along with it and involve me in what its saying.
All writers learn this, in time: don't show your work to other people until it's safely finished. Even discussing your unborn book in quite general terms can be such an undermining experience that, afterwards, you give it up and go to live in Guatema...
Writing is a solitary experience. I'm extremely superstitious. If I talk about the book or name the title out loud before finishing, I feel the energy I need to write will be drained. It's so intimate, I can't even share it with my wife.
When I'm working, I'm so narrowly focused on sound, language, rhythm, flow, that I rarely feel the emotion of the text. It's only after - long after - I've finished a piece that I can experience in any way its emotional charge.
Turn the preparing of food into a communal affair by enlisting others to help with the chopping, grating, stirring, simmering, tasting and seasoning. When the cooking is finished, eat together round the table with the electronic gadgets switched off ...
After college, I was living in New York and wrote furiously, a huge novel that I knew was a failure. I hoped that the book would work, but to be honest, I think I knew it would never work, even as I was finishing it.
I made a very conscious effort to finish 'The Cypress House' before 'So Cold the River' launched, because I thought that would help build a buffer between my writing and any impact that came from either the success or the failure of that first book.
When my family did shy away from Indian food, we'd eat a lot of Chinese. We'd use the wok a lot. I never had a problem with Brussels sprouts or broccoli growing up. I always grew up with the mentality of finishing your plate.
My life at home gives me absolute joy. There are some days when, as soon as you've finished cooking breakfast and cleaning up the kitchen, it's time to start lunch, and by the time you've done that, you're doing dinner and thinking, 'There has to be ...
My dream scenario would be that you could go into a bookshop, examine copies of every book in print that they're able to offer, then for a fee have them produce in a minute or two a beautiful finished copy in a dust jacket that you would pay for and ...
All the Midkemia stories are part of a 'history of an imaginary place,' so I've always known the cycle covered five rift wars. I just got to the end after 30 books. So there was no particular inspiration, save it was time to finish the whole shebang.
