I wanted to find something I could do at home. I sat down with a friend and made a list of all the things I could try, and one of them was writing a novel.
But what I hope for from a book - either one that I write or one that I read - is transparency. I want the story to shine through. I don't want to think of the writer.
My shorthand answer is that I try to write the kind of book that I would like to read. If I can make it clear and interesting and compelling to me, then I hope maybe it will be for the reader.
I never think in terms of target audience. I try to write what makes me laugh, so I'm the target audience. I guess I just hope there's another person in America like me.
I find so much writing colourless, small in its means, unwilling to take stylistic risks. Often it goes wrong; I am not the one to judge. Sometimes, I hope, it goes right.
I love writing novels, even if only a few thousand people read them. Here's my soul; I hope it appeals to your soul.
I know the world is filled with troubles and many injustices. But reality is as beautiful as it is ugly. I think it is just as important to sing about beautiful mornings as it is to talk about slums. I just couldn't write anything without hope in it.
Before I gave birth to Hope, I had a miscarriage. The pain was so enormous, I had to write myself out of it. I kept a diary and did not feel entirely complete until Hope was born.
There is a set of religious, or rather moral, writings which teach that virtue is the certain road to happiness, and vice to misery in this world. A very wholesome and comfortable doctrine, and to which we have but one objection, namely, that it is n...
The more women sit down and write something in a woman's voice for a woman, they more you'll see women in comedy because gender doesn't define sense of humor. Imagination and intelligence and perspective do.
The real violence is committed in the writing of history, the records of the legal system, the reporting of news, through the manipulation of social contracts, and the control of information.
The United States has written the white history of the United States. It now needs to write the black, Latino, Indian, Asian and Caribbean history of the United States.
I was totally absorbed in the real world, the politics, the history, the news, and I just couldn't find my way into the fictional world... When I finally could return to writing the novel, it was in fits and starts.
History is one of the only fields where contributions by amateurs are taken seriously, providing you follow the rules and document your sources. In history, it's what you write, not what your credentials are.
An hour or two spent in writing from dictation, another hour or two in reading aloud, a little geography and a little history and a little physics made the day pass busily.
You may write me down in history with your bitter, twisted lines. You may trod me in the very dirt, but still, like dust, I'll rise.
In a country like France, so ancient, their history is full of outstanding people, so they carry a heavy weight on their back. Who could write in French after Proust or Flaubert?
Let us see whether it is the New Order or me who will be the loser before Indonesian history. I have won. The New Order has fallen and my writings have been translated into 40 languages.
One could write a history of science in reverse by assembling the solemn pronouncements of highest authority about what could not be done and could never happen.
Throughout this evolution from left to right, Beard always detested war. Hence his writings were slanted to show that the military side of history was insignificant or a mere reflection of economic forces.
I write a ridiculous number of drafts. The characters change and grow through the drafting, and my understanding of them deepens. Creating characters in a novel is like shooting at clay pigeons and missing, and then missing more productively as the n...
