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I had novels to write, so I wrote them.

My writing often contains souvenirs of the day - a song I heard, a bird I saw - which I then put into the novel.

I've been working on my autobiography, just pecking away in longhand. The more you write, the more you remember. The more you remember, the more detail you recall. It's not all pleasant!

I wrote for magazines. I wrote adventure stuff, I wrote for the 'National Enquirer,' I wrote advertising copy for cemeteries.

I spill it out as fast as I can. I don't really edit. In Brazil, recently, I wrote 70 pages. In London, 80 pages.

My first five novels were written longhand. So were hosts of short stories.

When I first got back from the war, I said, 'I'm gonna write the Great American Novel about the Vietnam War.' So I sat down and wrote 1,700 pages of sheer psychotherapy drivel. It was first person, and there would be pages about wet socks and cold feet.

I wrote a lot of stuff quickly: pages and pages of notes that seemed pretty incoherent at first. Most of it was taken from the radio because -suddenly being a parent- I'd be confronted by the radio giving a news report every hour of the day.

I write pretty much anywhere - on planes, in hotel rooms, anywhere in my house.

I basically wrote five books with 'Night Soldiers,' called them novellas, and came in with a 600-page manuscript.