I write about it in the book and, you know, explain that. But that was the technicality that actually got my sentence reduced - that Alan Dershowitz used to have my sentence - it came down eventually to eight years.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
I have personally seen statements that were longer than some books I have read.
I believe if a sentence is to retain its strength over time, it needs to be carefully made.
I sometimes feel that if your book sells more than 20 years, then there's something in it that you can say, gee, I did something that endures, that's timeless.
So usually even if you like a sentence or a story or something, it won't come out that way - it'll come out years later, and in a different way, and you don't really control that.
If you're writing a novel, you're in a room for three or four years. There's not much coming in from the outside.
You know what writers say about their long books: If I had another year, the book would be half as long.
One might have thought that 70 years was time enough to work out what really happened in 1939. It isn't the case. Misunderstandings and misinformation abound.
I spend eight months outlining and researching the novel before I begin to write a single word of the prose.
In the summer of 1791, I gave up my concern in the 'New Annual Register,' the historical part of which I had written for seven years, and abdicated, I hope forever, the task of performing a literary labour, the nature of which should be dictated by anything but the promptings of my own mind.
It took me fifty years to deal with the Holocaust at all. And I did it in a literary way.