I wanted to write about Afghanistan before the Soviet war because that is largely a forgotten period in modern Afghan history.
The short of it is, as an aspiring writer, there is nothing as damaging to your credibility as saying that you don't like to read.
My wife is my in-home editor and reads everything I write.
Even after The Kite Runner was published I continued to practice for another eighteen months. But I had always had a love of writing and a compulsion to do it.
There isn't, even now, a great tradition of novel-writing in Afghanistan. Most of the literature is in the form of poetry.
The Irish didn't read and write for a couple of thousand years, and I think we developed good memories and recall. We have a sense of the revelatory detail. I look for them.
I like narrative, and I ultimately am in love with the men and women I write about, most of them.
I've always tried to write California history as American history. The paradox is that New England history is by definition national history, Mid-Atlantic history is national history. We're still suffering from that.
I'm not a writer. I marvel at writing. I am sometimes absolutely astounded when I read something and I think how in the world did that man or that woman sit down at a typewriter, a computer or a pen and an ink well, and seemingly have nothing come between their heart and that pen.
I write a lot about my experiences and the people I meet. Ive got a lot of material. But a book about me? It seems sort of odd.
I made a deal with myself that whenever I smoke weed, I have to be doing something productive: writing, recording, cutting a podcast, editing, etc.
I was raped. That was a hard thing to write about. I never owned that part of it. Guys don't look at themselves as being raped. We're not raised that way.
I get rejections from the New Yorker. When I had to give a little talk to the people graduating from the MBA program at Columbia who were going into writing and filmmaking and everything, I said, "When I tried to think of what to say, the only subject I thought was appropriate for people doing what you're going to do is rejection." That's what it's all about.
Those people are seen, I assume, by Larry [Kramer] as writing partly about gay issues and problems, whether it's on the surface or not, and I am not. But another thing is when we met, there still wasn't exactly a gay/straight divide in the minds of a lot of straight people. There weren't any gay people, as far as we knew, at Yale.
[Calvin Trilllin] is not writing about things that I can criticize. I can call these other people out for what I think they are not doing. There's a big difference.
I talked to [Larry] Kramer a little bit about it while I was writing 'Remembering Denny' . Denny was one of those people who took a long time to come out.
I don't write poetry for the New Yorker. My poems appear in the Nation, mostly.
Read as much as you write. Go out and meet other writers. Look for stories in everything around you - music, movies, family, strangers, your bus ride to work, and of course the streets. Also - keep moving forward, keep creating new things. Leave evidence of yourself in this world. Imagine what your legacy could be and try to create it.
I think a diversity of expression can only be good, so I think the more that people write about their experience, use their imagination to deal with their experience, you know, I think that's going to be good for not only for those authors but also for people who are interested in trying to understand it.
I've been writing poems and stories since I was about 13.
Poetry and prose are of equal importance to me as a reader, and there doesn't seem to be much difference in my own writing.
I know that the writers I read and admire all have an influence on my work, but trying to determine to what degree any particular piece of input changes the way I think about writing seems counterproductive.
I'm always most interested in writing about things that I don't understand.
Writing was always an aspiration, but I'd kept it a secret even from myself.
Me and Conan O'Brien and Robert Smigel and Dana Carvey wrote a script called 'Hans and Franz: The Girlyman Dilemma,' and it was going to be co-produced with Arnold Schwarzenegger, and he was going to co-star in it. We had a deal with Sony, we got paid to write it, and it was a musical, but it never got made because...I think Arnold kind of backed out at the last minute because he was getting cold feet because ;The Last Action Hero' had come out, where he was parodying himself. But it was a really funny script, and I wish it could've seen the light, because I think it would've done really well.
