My novels are very much the same, as I think many people's novels are.
No matter what writers say, most stories are about ourselves. The facts might change a little, but not much.
Most writers can tell stories of how their books failed to be made into films.
The biggest misconception that people have about the literary life is the romance of it. That a writer has this large world available to him or her of people, of ideas, of experiences, of interchange of ideas...
I don't really think it comes as a shock to every writer if somebody in their family is mad at them. Yes, it's very upsetting. But it's inherent in the process of trying to make sense of one's life, which is what I think is perhaps at the bottom of writing at all.
The best thing about being a writer is it gives you readers who understand your deepest feelings and fears.
The road that led me to literature was very different from the one followed by my fellow writers in Poland.
When you're a working writer, sooner or later friends and acquaintances will get you alone and confide that they, too, have a book in them.
I'm friends with a lot of writers and so many of them say how much they hate signings and how they leave after a certain period of time. But what is so hard about sitting there while people tell you how much they love you? And if you don't like it, well, learn to like it. I try to take one person at a time. I never look down the line to see how many more people are left. And I always try to make people talk about something besides whatever they planned to say.
Readers are fools. They believe all writing is autobiographical. And so it is, but not in the way they think. The writer's life needs time to rot away before it can be used to nourish a work of fiction. it must be allowed to decay.
