It's so many years of reading story. You leave work and it goes away till you see it air on television.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
I just love the idea that people disappear into the story for a while. You grab a book, and you want to get back to it, and your life becomes a bit of an interruption. I would love readers to feel like that.
The writing life is one long, never-ending search for narrative. Well, it's not even a conscious searching. It happens even while you're busy buying groceries and when you're fast asleep. It's a curse.
It takes a long time to write a novel when you have to keep interrupting your work to earn money.
A writer loses possession of her work as soon as it's reaches its audience. Each reader brings his own experience and prejudice and imagination to the work. Television adaptation just goes one step further, and the novelist has to learn to let go.
Writers have it easy. If you write a bestseller or have your book made into a movie, you'll never have to work again, or so the myth goes.
I quit my job just to quit. I didn't quit my job to write fiction. I just didn't want to work anymore.
It's a very dull thing to watch, a writer at work. So dull that whole casts of characters show up just to watch the boring writer writing.
Reading takes me to a different place than my everyday life. I usually get fully involved in what I'm reading about, so it's a great escape.
Writers seem to me to be people who need to retire from social life and do a lot of thinking about what's happened - almost to calm themselves.
I still have a full-time day job, which is why it took me five years to write An Ear to the Ground, and why I won't have another book finished by next week.