My experience is that books take on a life of their own and create their own energy. I've represented books that have been sold for very little money and gone on to great glory, and I've seen books sold for an enormous amount of money published to very little response.
This morning I looked at the books on my shelves and thought that they have no knowledge of my existence. They come to life because I open them and turn their pages, and yet they don't know that I am their reader.
Private life, book life, took place where words met imagination without passing through the world.
The book doesn't end when you finish writing it.
With each book I write, I become more and more convinced that the books have a life of their own, quite apart from me.
I sometimes think that, since I started writing biographies, I've had more of a life in books than I have had in my real life.
If time heals all wounds, and a book can hold a person's entire life, then you can speed up the process with a pulp time warp.
I think I learned about the relationship between books and life from Margaret Mitchell.
A life spent largely among books, and in the exercise of a literary profession, has very obvious drawbacks, as a subject-matter, when one comes to write about it.
There are a lot of us, some published, some not, who think the literary life is the loveliest one possible, this life of reading and writing and corresponding. We think this life is nearly ideal.
I don't like to make my life like a book.
As a writer, you live in such isolation. It's hard to imagine your book has a life beyond you.
