I had some bad jobs when I was young. Writing is not one of them. If you're fortunate enough to reach my age, to still be writing, you have to be grateful, and I am. I've been lucky. For many years, all I've done is writing, and it's all I've ever wanted to do.
Film is the art of turning money into light, and light into money. But it begins with money.
The enslavement, humiliation, torture, and ultimate destruction of thousands upon thousands of human beings for a project for which there was ultimately no purpose is a horror that's very hard to imagine, far less understand.
I think empathy's a terrible danger for a writer.
Literary prizes serve a purpose if they allow for discussion of books.
One cannot distinguish between human and non-human acts. One cannot point, one cannot say this man here is a man and that man there is a devil.
In the end you're not made or broken by prizes. Your relationship is with your readers, not a prize, and you just have to keep on honoring that.
What you're constantly seeking isn't a style, but a transparency between your soul and the words. And your soul is ever in flux, so therefore you have to constantly find new forms of words that might be able to register these changes in the soul.
We live in a material world, not a dramatic one.
You have to attempt to find new forms that will force you to write freshly and better and hopefully more truthfully.
I think it's common sense to shy away from the erotic. Perhaps this grand experiment, which started with Lady Chatterley's Lover, of seeing what you can write and how you can write about sex, has reached a certain weary terminus with Fifty Shades of Grey.
Most of us have loved. And the terror for a writer is that readers will forgive you so much, but they won't forgive you one false note about love, about which they too are expert.
The fallacy is that you have to hold some sort of stake in the grief or horror in order to write about it - I think the opposite is true.
Love is the scent of a sleeping back, death a slight draft of bad breath.
