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There's a statistical theory that if you gave a million monkeys typewriters and set them to work, they'd eventually come up with the complete works of Shakespeare. Thanks to the Internet, we now know this isn't true.

Books are humanity in print.

I would just watch the animals, and their stories would roll out when I wrote.

In Hollywood the woods are full of people that learned to write but evidently can't read. If they could read their stuff, they'd stop writing.

And out of a desire essentially to imitate what I was reading, I began to write, like a clever monkey.

I had a little portable typewriter. I call it my Harlem Literary Fellowship.

Without books, we might just melt into the airwaves and be just another set of blips.

Basically, particularly in Britain, it's a hegemonic thing that people who write tend to come from the leisure classes. They can afford the time and the books.

When I began to write and used a typewriter, I went through three drafts of a book before showing it to an editor.