There's a new children's book that's coming out that features Sarah Palin as a hero. I don't want to give away the ending, but we finally find out who shot Bambi's mother.
Al Gore announced he is finishing up a new book about global warming and the environment. Yeah, the first chapter talks about how you shouldn't chop down trees to make a book that no one will read.
A comic book publisher says he's trying to increase voter turnout in the presidential election by publishing comic books about John McCain and Barack Obama. Yeah, the publisher said that the election comic books are targeted at first-time voters and long-time virgins.
President Clinton signed a $10 million deal to write a book by 2003. Isn't that amazing? Yes, and get this, not only that, President Bush signed a $10 million deal to read a book by 2003.
In the press this week, NBC has been calling me every name in the book. In fact, they think I'm such an idiot they now want me to run the network.
I am of the opinion, and even more so the older I get, that it is more difficult to have hope than it is to despair. And I mean this in the sense that in order to have hope you must acknowledge the despair and then you have to get beyond it. Taken from a radio interview given on BBC Radio 4's Open Book
Whenever summer rolls around I begin to realize that I'm a complete and utter book snob. In relation to reading, I have absolutely no guilty pleasures at all. No graphic novels. No murder mysteries. My summer read is really no different from my winter read. I know many bookshops and magazines would have me believe that our summer forays are different, but literature is literature, and unfortunately snobbery is snobbery.
I have different books for different times of the day, let alone different seasons of the year!
A book is completed only when it is finished by a reader.
Growing up devouring horror comics and novels, and being inspired to become a writer because of horror novels, movies, and comic books, I always knew I was going to write a horror novel.
I can't say that you should extract this or that value from my books explicitly. They are up for interpretation. In terms of the obligation, I think we're all individuals on this planet, trying to scratch our way through the day, and if you're writing a book exposing atrocities in Rwanda or writing a murder mystery set in a mountain village, I think both ways of spending you time are valid and both books are probably fine to read.
I write the books that I'm compelled to and I definitely learn things about the world when I write them, and I hope that other people get something out of them, enjoy them, see the world differently when they're done.
Early on my career, I figured out that I just have to write the book I have to write at that moment. Whatever else is going on in the culture is just not that important. If you could get the culture to write your book, that would be great. But the culture can't write your book.
In terms of why everything is different, each book is different than the one before because I'm so bored of what I just finished I want to work on something different. The next book becomes an antidote to what I did before.
Twenty years ago, when I started writing, I didn't define myself as an African-American writer. And then you write books and you're focused on what's inside your books, and that kind of term is generally used on the outside, by the critical establishment.
I think each book has its own way of accommodating my concerns, whether it's about race, America, technology, the city.
I always have a few ideas that are percolating, and then after I've finished a book and it's a year later, and things are sort of festering and things are disgusting in my house and I have to get back to work, whatever project I keep thinking about is the one I end up working on. Sort of a very simple process of elimination.
I write books and either people read them or they don't read them. The rise of Facebook or e-books doesn't change the difficulty level of writing sentences and thinking up new ideas.
As I get older and write more books I'm definitely allowing the humorous side of my personality more rein in my work.
When a book comes from the publisher and you see it for the first time... Of course it's not remotely like seeing a baby for the first time, but I can remember with each book what room I was in when I opened it. That would be excitement, though, I think. Not pride.
The old Victorian laws against homosexuality were still on the statute books until the early 1990s. As a gay man living in Ireland, I and people like me found it easy to feel less than citizens.
I am violently untidy. My desk is overcrowded. I write my first drafts in longhand in a long notebook using a plastic throwaway fountain pen. Then I work on a word processor using a different desk and a different room.
I think you can get a sort of intensity and an edginess offering nine stories in a book. Competing versions of things.
It is important to find a publisher and equally important not to be noticed until your third or fourth book.
My books and other works are my legacy, and it's a great comfort to know that mine is a legacy of pleasure for other people.
