The first drafts of my novels have all been written in longhand, and then I type them up on my old electric. I have resisted getting a computer because I distrust the whole PC thing. I don't think a great book has yet been written on computer.
Creating a book and creating a collection involve a lot of editing.
Everything in the world exists in order to end up as a book.
Eight was about the age I was when I realized that people actually produced books, they didn't just spring out of the library shelves.
Write the book you want to read, the one you cannot find.
I really appreciate what it takes to create a book. I understand the loneliness that it involves and the excitement and the vulnerability: I especially identify with that.
Writing a book is so much harder than I imagined.
Books, I don't know what you see in them. I can understand a person reading them, but I can't for the life of me see why people have to write them.
For me, the whole process involves envisioning this book in my head as I'm working.
If you try to write 1,000 words a day, as I do, after 100 days you'll look up and have a book. It may be a mess, and you may have to revise it 50 times, but you can't revise it if you haven't written it.
I am never really surprised at the way my books take shape. They are just not as perfect as I'd like them to be.
Contrary to what people think, I slave over my books.
A book comes and says, 'Write me.
I grew up around books. When I first held the book and it was a substantive, tangible thing, and I thought of all the work that went into it, not just my work but everybody else's and the research and so forth, there's a sense of really have done something worthwhile.
'The Book of Air and Shadows' was born during a conference with an intellectual property lawyer on a particular afternoon in November of 2003.
I take a very long time to write my books - from five to ten years.
When my daughter was born, I was reading a lot of children's books, and there weren't any characters who looked like her. For all the content that's out there, there aren't many African-American protagonists. I looked at it like, if there isn't someone else creating it then I have to do it myself.
I write every day. I'm always in the process of writing my last book, until the next one.
The author may not interpret. But he must tell why and how he wrote his book.
I put things down on sheets of paper and stuff them in my pockets. When I have enough, I have a book.
Normal people bring children into the world; we novelists bring books. We are condemned to put our whole lives into them, even though they hardly ever thank us for it. We are condemned to die in their pages and sometimes even to let our books be the ones who, in the end, will take our lives.
If they won't write the kind of books we like to read we shall have to write them ourselves.
The book, the idea of a book or the image of a book, is a symbol of learning, of transmitting knowledge.. I make my own books to find my way through the old stories.
Also, if nothing else, writing this book has really changed the way I experience bookstores. I have a whole different appreciation for the amount of work packed into even the slimmest volume on the shelves.
All of my books are about researching. I do all the research and I give it to a writer who can put it in the written word better than I could.
