Before I published anything, I dreamed of publication, but I didn't actually write for it. I imagined that writing for an audience was something for fancier people. I aspired, but mostly I wrote for myself. I wrote because it made me happy.
Right up until the late 18th century, when the first weighted lines were used to probe the ocean depths, many people believed the seas were bottomless - the watery equivalent of infinite outer space.
Obviously, in journalism, you're confined to what happens. And the tendency to embellish, to mythologize, it's in us. It makes things more interesting, a closer call. But journalism taught me how to write a sentence that would make someone want to re...
A close associate of his gave an interview in which the book was described as quotes 'fiction from being to end'. I suffered trial by tabloid for a couple of weeks, lots of insults in the press, in the columns - this man should be put in the tower an...
I think her friends were worried that the bulimia might come back, about some psychological slide, and she was given breathing space to some extent by the media as much as she ever has been.
That was par for the course but I also found that commissions were being canceled and in fact I considered this directly libelous - I write biographies for a living as well as being a journalist - for a non fiction book to be called fiction from begi...
Thatcher came under pressure from right wing backbenchers to shut up the Prince of Wales and there was a deal done between them where he did actually shut up in the end.
They tend to be civil servants, often diplomats drawn from the Foreign Office, who may be very pleasant, intelligent people, but once they get inside the Palace they're riveted to the status quo and they lose track of public opinion in the real world...
Area 51 is located in southern Nevada desert about 75 miles north of Las Vegas. It's set inside a greater land parcel that's about the size of the state of Connecticut that's called the 'Nevada Test and Training Range.'
One of the few things the Air Force did admit to me existed out there presently without admitting that it was Area 51 is this drone called the 'Beast of Kandahar' which does not fire missiles, unlike the Predator and the Reaper, but just conducts sur...
The newly released movie 'Noah' features a retelling of the creation story that clearly depicts Darwinian evolution transforming a single-cell organism into a monkey. The movie also seems to show magic in scenes more reminiscent of the occult than of...
We Americans have a sense of ourselves as a moral people. We have led the way in the fight for human rights in the world. Mistreating prisoners makes the world see our moral claims as hypocrisy.
Clearly the human story is one of acceleration. There has been a Moore curve in terms of the number of people alive on the planet, our technological ability, and our ability to understand ourselves. We have had this extraordinary, explosive growth in...
There are many people who say, 'I write for myself.' I think that if you write and publish, then you write for your readers, not just for yourself. Many writers say that they write to be loved. I place myself among those writers.
I really consider myself a writer, and a writer who is sometimes a social critic. I'm not an ideologue, I don't join a party. I follow along and take notes. Sometimes I throw in my two cents.
Nowadays, the Internet decides if you're good, not the big man in the big office. No matter how important that man thinks he is, everyone else knows that he's not important anymore, and the Internet decides these things, here in the modern age.
There are those on Wall Street and in the plutocracy who feel that Geithner is a hero who deftly steered the country from economic ruin. To many ordinary Americans, however, he is considered a Wall Street puppet and a servant of the so-called bankste...
I've always been charmed by houses, and descriptions of them are prominent in my novels. So prominent, in fact, that my editor once pointed out to me that all of my early novels had houses on the covers.
Somebody said writing is easy, you just sit down at your typewriter and open a vein. It depends on the book. Some, I have to do quite a lot of research, which I like. Others are much closer to me.
What Ottawa and Washington used to think about Turkey or Iran was not very important because we really didn't think much about either, but now what we think about them is extremely important - to ourselves and to many other peoples.
I am a businessman at the end of the day. I have grown up with Excel sheets. I start out writing my novel with spreadsheets and the milestones in each chapter highlighted.
