Every book is a unique experience.
There's still, even now, a part of me that can't believe that I got published. That part of me has never gone away.
I'm always reading. I've loved reading since I was young, and I've always loved sinking my teeth into a different world, especially one that you begin to create in your head.
I wrote one book, signed with a good agent, and sat back and waited for the phone to ring. I was sure that the great news would come at any moment. Four books later, I finally got that call.
When we read we are able to travel to many places, meet many people and understand the world.
When I was 19, I took a train from Houston to New York, and I had in my lap the collected works of William Shakespeare. The play I read on that journey was 'Titus Andronicus.'
Finishing a good book is like leaving a good friend.
My first published novel, 'American Rust,' took three and a half years of full-time work to write. But I wrote two apprentice novels before that.
There's something paralyzing about being a writer that you have to escape. I don't want to think of myself as a guy who's written a bunch of books. The 26 letters distance us from our own hesitations and they make us sound as if we know what we're doing. We know grammar, we know prose, but actually we're all just struggling in the dark, really.
I think of writers as explorers, not necessarily as detectives. So there is certainly detecting that is going on - they're explorers.
In 1980, I published my first novel, in the usual swirl of unjustified hope and justified anxiety.
To read a paper book is another experience: you can do it on a ship, on the branch of a tree, on your bed, even if there is a blackout.
Publishing, legacy or indie, is a vehicle, and you can't opine about whether someone has chosen the right vehicle if you don't know where she intends to drive it.
I like books that aren't just lovely but that have memories in themselves. Just like playing a song, picking up a book again that has memories can take you back to another place or another time.
Beginning writers must appreciate the prerequisites if they hope to become writers. You pay your dues - which takes years.
Yes, the stories are dangerous, she was right. A book is a magic carpet that flies you off elsewhere. A book is a door. You open it. You step through. Do you come back?
Writing is a strong easement for perplexity. My life is a map, spread out with all the rivers and hills showing.
I started writing when I was twenty, and my first book came out seventeen years later.
I was twenty-nine years old and I wasn't a very good poet and I wasn't a very good novelist, [so] I thought I would try writing a play, which seems to have worked out a little better.
I began my writing life as a poet, so poetry has always been fundamental. I evolved from poetry to journalism to stories to novels. But poetry was always there.
I remember the days of sitting at book signings, playing with my pen when no one would come, and still I even then thought I was living the dream, because I had a book out.
When I wrote The Onion Field, I realized that my first two novels were just practice.
To read a writer is for me not merely to get an idea of what he says, but to go off with him and travel in his company.
Reading Edmund Morris's 'Colonel Roosevelt' is a rewarding journey, as it must also have been for its author, who concludes his three-volume saga begun in 1980 with publication of 'The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt.'
After a summer trip to Switzerland, which was rich in experiences, I started writing. In the beginning, I aimed at descriptions of nature and folk life until, as the years passed, the description of man became my chief interest.
