As a print journalist, if you hear a rumour you try to stand it up and if you can't, the story dies. With a blog you can throw the rumour out there and ask for help. You can say: 'We don't know if this is true or not.'
When I first moved to London for university, I was already a big fan of Diesel because, in the nineties, Diesel was, like, the brand. The stores were the place to go. It wasn't workwear like Levi's or G-Star.
You can find a mentor; you have to ask questions, you have to show interest in what the other person is doing. You have to have curiosity - I think that people appreciate that and will want to help you.
For research, I like to go to the location of the places in the novels. The first thing that I do is involve my senses: I notice the smells; I open the trash cans and look at what people have thrown away.
I always wrote little things when I was younger. My first opus was a book of poems put down in a spiral notebook at five or six, handsomely accompanied by crayon illustrations.
I read like an animal. I read under the covers, I read lying in the grass, I read at the dinner table. While other people were talking to me, I read.
If I had a camera,' I said, 'I'd take a picture of you every day. That way I'd remember how you looked every single day of your life.
The singular power of literature lies not in its capacity for accurate representation of mass commonalities, but its ability to illuminate the individual life in a way that expands our understanding of some previously unseen or unarticulated aspect o...
It was one thing to snuggle a little when the world seemed about to end, and quite another to explain to her parents that she wanted to date an ancient magical horse.
Angry men with pointy things sent to secure a foreign city are pretty much alike anywhere. That's what I've heard. So far nothing's convinced me different.
You know, there are not only - all of the networks, and I mean every television news operation and print and radio and magazines, newspapers, all of them, are remiss in the diversity area. I mean, none of these organizations have reached a level of p...
I think of it as the lasagna approach to writing because I'm always adding layers. I'll sometimes do it layer by layer, with dialogue, attribution, action, objects in the scene, setting... It can be sometimes that delineated.
Don't let your characters tell you what to do. They can be pushy. Some writers say that they create characters and then just sort of follow them around through the narrative. I think that these writers are out of their minds.
People read stuff over your shoulder when you're in public, and when you write the kind of stuff I do, and people read it over your shoulder, it makes you a little self-conscious.
When I say that I went to grad school in Iowa City, people often assume that I went to the famed writers' workshop MFA program at the University of Iowa. I didn't. I got a master's in journalism.
Language and written language are the only real way we have to see inside another person's thoughts and to know what makes another person human. Without writing, we just wouldn't have that kind of access.
Where do thoroughbreds go after they lose one too many races, throw one too many riders, or develop a limp? Many thousands of thoroughbreds end up being slaughtered for horse meat. The unpleasant truth is horse meat is eaten in Europe and Asia.
When you sit down to write, you have to be prepared to strip all of those voices away, all of the censors away, and talk about what you think the truth is, which I think is really the task of the writer - to get to the truth.
We really set out in all our books to say something. Every one is an effort to bring the reader over and show them our theory as to why what we're talking about needs to be talked about.
I'm actually not a huge circus fan in the traditional sense, but I like a lot of the circus trappings of striped tents and caramel. I lean more towards Cirque du Soleil than Barnum and Bailey.
I liked the idea of having actual magic performed as stage magic, so you could assume that it was just a trick, that something is all smoke and mirrors, but there's that, like, feeling at the back of your mind: What if it's not?
