Three publishers came to me at the White House after George lost and said, 'We would like to publish your book.' I said, 'Well, I don't have a book,' and they said well it's a well known fact that you have kept diaries.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
As I said, I had no publisher for What a Carve Up! while I was writing it, so all we had to live off was my wife's money and little bits I was picking up for journalism.
I always have Moleskine notebooks on my desk. I am a big journaler. Every day I write down where I went, who I spoke to and what it was all about. Richard Branson told me to do that.
There is something so hopeful about a diary, a journal, a new notebook, which Joan Didion and Virginia Woolf both wrote about. A blog. Perhaps we all are waiting for someone to discover us.
It is important to find a publisher and equally important not to be noticed until your third or fourth book.
This book was company for me - I wrote these things when I was in hotels, far from where I normally live. I never intended to publish it.
I started writing diaries, and mine were horrible. Oh, the monotony. Oh, the angst. I said, 'I don't want anyone to find these!' I destroyed them.
My books should feel like you're getting a peek into a private world: a diary no one was meant to read. As soon as I start thinking, 'This book is going to be published,' my drawing becomes calculated and deliberate. It's one of the ways I trick myself.
I've thrown away lots of my old diaries - you never know who might get their hands on them. But I have kept a few notes on the good old days.
My memoirs were written, and a portion of them already in the hands of the publishers, when the startling news came which has thrilled all Europe and filled her inhabitants with horror - the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, President of the United States.
When I was growing up the publishing world seemed so far away. When my mother wrote a book, she would look up the address of publishers on the backs of the books she owned and send off her manuscript.