In Celan's words a Jew is "a man with a little book under the shoulder." We are the keepers of tradition.
I haven't found it to be particularly enjoyable... ninety percent of the time when I go on dates, I'm thinking, 'I could be reading my book instead.'
I would not wear any clothes that had a brand name on them, and I only read books that were canonical. I wouldn't wear makeup, and I didn't like to let boys open the door for me because I felt like it was sexist. My heart was in the right place, but I was such a tiny dictator about it. It's embarrassing to me now because I was so rigid. It's such a rigid way of looking at the world. There's something very young about that mind-set.
I would not wear any clothes that had a brand name on them, and I only read books that were canonical.
I've never read one book about my father.
If you want to catch the right mental attitude, go where that attitude exists. Start by going to the people who have the right mental attitude. If the right people aren't always available, then go the right book, or to the right recording of a dynamic speaker.
What you do off the job plays a major role in how far you go on the job. How many good books, do you read each year? How often do you attend workshops? Who do you spend must of your time with?
The twentieth century saw a professionalization of fiction writing, particularly in its second half and particularly in the Anglo-Saxon world - not so much mainland Europe, for example. This professionalization is a tragedy. Hand in hand with this - and I have no idea what the causal relations are - there has been a rise in the idea of The Author, so that today one often has the impression that what's selling the book is not the book but the author.
Listening to people discussing a novel can be very interesting, if you've read whatever novel is being discussed. No one, it seems, ever says, "This is a great book but I didn't like it." Taking a little time to think about why this might be has been very liberating.
Until I reached my late teens, there was not enough money for luxuries - a holiday, a car, or a computer. I learned how to program a computer, in fact, by reading a book. I used to write down programs in a notebook and a few years later when we were able to buy a computer, I typed in my programs to see if they worked. They did. I was lucky.
I feel much more comfortable in politics than I did in book writing. Book writing is so hard. Politics felt easy compared to that.
You do not conceive a novel as easily as you conceive a child, nor even half as easily as you create nonfiction work. A journalist amasses facts, anecdotes and interviews with top brass. Enough of these add up to a book. A novelist demands quite different things. He has to find himself in his materials, to know for sure how he would feel and act and the events he writes about. In addition, he requires a catalyst — a person, idea, or emotion which coalesces his ingredients and makes them jell into a solid purpose.
All my books are made up of other books. They're all deeply structured on other fiction, because I was a student in fiction and I didn't have much actual living to draw on. I suspect a lot of other people's novels are like that, too, though they might be slower to talk about it.
I don't keep any copies of my books in the house - they go to my mum's flat. I don't like them around.
It's difficult to tell the truth about how a book begins. The truth, as far as it can be presented to other people, is either wholly banal or too intimate.
It has historically been a comfort for the bourgeois and that you can read the most extreme books and not change. You can read A Christmas Carol and not change in any way.
For example, you have these grotesque, hilarious, profane ghosts in the book [Lincoln in the Bardo]. Even the concept of talking ghosts is, from an aesthetic point of view, grotesque. But you seem compelled by that risk in order to get to the other end of the equation.
I have an ambition to write a great book, but that's really a competition with myself. I've noticed that a lot of young writers, people in all media, want to be famous but they don't really want to do anything. I can't think of anything less worth striving for than fame.
First rule of writing: When still a child, make sure you read a lot of books. Spend more time doing this than anything else.
If you're going to write a good book, you have to make mistakes and you have to not be so cautious all the time.
don't mean to sound weird but I get so immersed in the source material when I'm working on a movie that I kind of lose the line between what I thought of and what was in the book.
In the Making Of book ["300"] there's a guy named Victor Davis Hanson who is a a frickin genius. He's a Greek historian and we showed him the movie because I wanted him to write a forward to the Making Of book. I was a little nervous to be honest, because I wasn't sure how he'd react.
Well, Bradbury's a genius. Fahrenheit 451 is one of my favorite books of all time, and The Illustrated Man as a collection of short stories ranks up there. When you read it you realize how influential it is on so many other stories and people.
I love comic books - maybe to a fault sometimes.
The challenge with 'Watchmen' is making sure that the ideas that were in the book got into the movie. That was my biggest stretch. I wanted people to watch the movie and get it. It's one of those things where, over time, it has happened more.
