I sleep on my stomach with my head under a bunch of pillows so if someone wants to come in and try to kill me they can't tell if I'm there or not, so they'll just leave.
Don't worry about meaning. If a story's any good, it can't help but have meaning. Let the PhDs tell you what your story means.
If you can tell stories, create characters, devise incidents, and have sincerity and passion, it doesn't matter a damn how you write.
My doctor tells me I should start slowing it down - but there are more old drunks than there are old doctors so let's all have another round.
When we make a mistake, it becomes front-page news. We don't need any reporter telling us how badly we played.
Anyone who is considered funny will tell you, sometimes without even your asking, that deep inside they are very serious, neurotic, introspective people.
On 11 September, I was living in Greenwich Village, New York; my children learned to tell south from north by looking at the World Trade Center.
I am so happy that I didn't go to school and I didn't have anyone to tell me how to position my fingers on the piano correctly.
In our world of rampant 'individualisation', relationships are mixed blessings. They vacillate between a sweet dream and a nightmare, and there is no telling when one turns into the other.
For the doubters out there, of course I was going to have help from Penguin's editorial team in telling my story, which I talked about from the beginning.
Authors by the hundreds can tell you stories by the thousands of those rejection slips before they found a publisher who was willing to 'gamble' on an unknown.
Routines may include taking a warm bath or a relaxing walk in the evening, or practicing meditation/relaxation exercises. Psychologically, the completion of such a practice tells your mind and body that the day's work is over and you are free to rela...
I have to tell you that June Cleaver had a job in 'The New Leave It to Beaver.' She did. Sure, she was a council woman. She went to work. She wasn't a sit-at-home grandma. She went out, got a job.
The Phil Spector that I would meet has always been a nice, quiet, little guy who's very serious about his work; obviously you can tell that because each and everything he's ever done has always been charted.
In France you cannot not have lunch. If you stopped the French from having lunch, you will have a second revolution, I can tell you this. Not going to work - it is part of the French privilege.
My husband jokes that I'll invite people over for dinner and he won't know who they are or where I met them. But in my work world, I've never really been tempted to tell too much of my story.
It would be counterproductive to tell people exactly what they are supposed to do and exactly how they are supposed to do it to a point where they become more concerned about your expectations than about completing their work in a quality way.
I hadn't ever felt any particular calling to be a novelist, and I clearly remember telling a friend of mine about six months before I started work on 'Elsewhere' that I would never write a novel.
Does anyone actually think I'm going to call Tiger Woods and tell him what to do with his swing one day, and he's going to go out and do it, simple as that? It doesn't work like that.
I know this sounds phony, but I don't start out on a project going, 'I'm going to make an emotional work,' you know what I mean? You try to tell the story directly and honestly and with passion.
People always tell me, 'Don't work so much', but I can't help it. I feel like all the things I've done are important to get to this adult stage and now I'm getting all these adult offers, so it's working.
