I used to do my own taxes. You know how you buy that gigantic sheet at Staples, add up the restaurants, clothes, and taxis and glue your receipts into the book month by month? The more money I made, the more complicated things got.
My wife gave me a year to start making money out of writing, and after six months, I'd made not a bean. Suddenly, the books took off, and the beans started coming in!
We've patented the idea... of using the address book as a place to declare that you like a brand. By so doing, the brand has now got your permission to send you personal messages - it could be money off offers, coupons, promotions, just information, ...
When I was 16, the first book I ever actually purchased with my own money, in fact, and had read on my own time was 'Hunt for Red October' by Tom Clancy.
If you pay a child a dollar to read a book, as some schools have tried, you not only create an expectation that reading makes you money, you also run the risk of depriving the child for ever of the value of it. Markets are not innocent.
We're kidding on that. One of the things I insisted upon when we went into this project was that we are full partners, going fifty-fifty, both on the money and on the say of what's going on with the books.
They give me the money, I give them the book. Having input into the adaptation would be kind of like selling a house and coming back three years later and saying, 'Paint it this color!'
We had gone out on the road in 94 and 95 for a three month American tour, and we realised, as did our manager and booking agent at the time, that we have really exhausted it, and we can't make money at this anymore.
But I can tell you that the issue, on one side, boils down to money - a lot of money. And it boils down to people and their connections with this money, and that's the portion that, even with this book, has not been mentioned to this day.
Money is an unavoidable consequence, but it isn't the reason I write; if it was, I wouldn't have written any of the YA books, because advances in that field are small compared to what I'd got now for an 'adult' DW.
One thing is that I wasn't getting booked that well, and they had control over who got the awards, they had control over who sold. And they really did not want Willie or me, either one, to have a hit record. They wanted the money, but they didn't wan...
All novels are about crime. You'd be hard pressed to find any novel that does not have an element of crime. I don't see myself as a crime novelist, but there are crimes in my books. That's the nature of storytelling, if you want to reflect the real w...
When I first began to combine letters other than Hebrew, I read every book in German that came my way, and from these I certainly received according to the nature of my soul.
My nature is... well... I'm a searcher by nature. I'm constantly searching for something; that's why I have a song called 'Looking for Something.' How do I do it? I read a lot of spiritual books; I meditate.
I wanted to be of service to the Peace League, and how could I better do so than by trying to write a book which should propagate its ideas? And I could do it most effectively, I thought, in the form of a story.
Although many of his other novels are brilliant there is a power in 'Oliver Twist' that I believe Dickens never managed to retrieve. It is as if he was sent to this earth with the sole purpose of writing this book.
My books deliberately provide no answers or messages. I'm drilled in the habit of objectivity and also aware that the steady drip of fiction has more power than facts to shape opinion, so I handle it with caution.
When you look at 'Grapes of Wrath,' the weakest moments are those in which Steinbeck is spouting a political idea directly at the reader. The book's real power comes from its slower, broader movement.
Concrete poets continue to turn out beautiful things, but to me they're more visual than oral, and they almost really belong on the wall rather than in a book. I haven't the least idea of where poetry is going.
Being able to say something lyrically, to say something that will do more than just be words, is really hard. It's easy to do when you're writing a chapter of a book or writing poetry, but it's really hard to do when you're confined to a melody line.
I'd never really been content with just churning out these slim volumes every three or four years. I've always tried to think of poetry as an active ingredient in the language rather than just something that appears between the covers of thin books.
