It is human nature to want to believe in the wizardry of the magician--but also to turn against him and to scorn him the moment that he commits the slightest error that reveals his trickery. Those in the audience are embarrassed to have been so easily astonished, and they blame the performer for their gullibility.
To a predator, fear indicates weakness.
One of the underlying things I like to do in books, is just say, stop and look at this for a moment. Not that you've got to believe that Jesus was real, or not to believe in God, but the belief that it isn't just happenstance.
There's never any humongous next draft. I know a writer who every time he finished a novel - you would know his name very well - but his editor would come and live with him for a month. And they would go through the manuscript together.
I think the world is an interesting place and I don't think anybody has the firm and final answer to what it is but I kind of assume there's a purpose.
I never have lunch because it makes me foggy-headed.
If I had to write a rough draft, all the way through and then go back and start over, I probably would just stop writing. I wouldn't find that interesting. I would feel that I had committed so many things to the paper that I couldn't easily undo because one thing leads to the next, the interconnectedness, the sequences would make it very hard to change something that simply didn't work.
I just became fascinated with how complex and unlikely the universe is and life is and Catholicism gives me an answer to that.
The world is a very complex and interesting place and that is what I really want my fiction to say: wake up to how amazing the world is.
There's still a fascination with somebody who can write at book length, no matter what the book is.
I always enjoyed the kids, but I didn't enjoy the bureaucracy of the educational system.
I have advice for new writers, first of all, at any time in the history of publishing in my experience, there will be endless number people telling you that you can't do what you are trying to do. You won't succeed, there's something else you should be doing.
Strangely enough, for many many years I didn't talk about my childhood and then when I did I got a ton of mail - literally within a year I got a couple of thousand letters from people who'd had a worse childhood, a similar childhood, a less-bad childhood, and the question that was most often posed to me in those letters was: how did you get past the trauma of being raised by a violent alcoholic?
I always thought happiness was a choice and I always chose things that made me happy, and books were one of those.
We never had books in the house. Not any book in our house. Not a Bible, not anything. So, I would go the library from a very young age and get the books out.
I love my editor, but that would be the definition of hell to me to live with someone and have them go page by page through my manuscript. That I want to avoid at all costs.
I've always operated with a great deal of self-doubt. Every time I start a new book it's like, well, this one will destroy the career and I have to overcome that feeling especially in the first hundred pages of the book.
I have a sofa on which I never nap, big windows with an ocean view that I rarely see because I keep the pleated shades down at all times while working. I know I'm a potential slacker, so I don't tempt myself.
I come down on the side of free will but I have sympathy for those who believe in fate because there is something about life which we feel we have no control over.
I am basically a pretty good autodidact. I can teach myself things.
I build a book the way coral reefs are built: millions of little calcareous skeletons piling up one atop another, though in my case the skeletons are drafts.
Sometimes many publishers prefer that you write the same book every time, but I have a low boredom threshold so that isn't going to happen.
I kind of build a novel the way marine polyps build a coral reef, it's millions and millions of little precarious bodies stacked on one another. And in my case, that's thousands of minutes I go through to get from one scene to the next and build it that way.
As much as I've produced it looks to people like I must have written quickly, but it isn't that - because I put in in a sixty- or seventy-hour week.
When I'm in the middle of a book it can go up from there. When you're putting in those hours, the real world kind of fades and the world you're creating becomes almost more real to you than the outside world.
