I'm looking for backing for an unauthorized auto-biography that I am writing. Hopefully, this will sell in such huge numbers that I will be able to sue myself for an extraordinary amount of money and finance the film version in which I will play everybody.
I am particularly wary of authors who put themselves on the cover of their own book.
Seeing yourself in print is such an amazing concept: you can get so much attention without having to actually show up somewhere... You don't have to dress up, for instance, and you can't hear them boo you right away.
I just wrote what I wanted to be reading.
That's a wonderful change that's taken place, and so most poetry today is published, if not directly by the person, certainly by the enterprise of the poet himself, working with his friends.
I thought if I put my book up on the Internet as a file that you could download, and I told people about it, maybe some people would download it and read it, and maybe I could get some response.
I think the first thing you release should come from you. If you want your first piece to be exactly how you want it to be, and how you see it, you should release it yourself.
I've been writing a lot more, I believe, because of the Internet. I've been posting stuff that I've written and I've just been writing.
The moment a man sets his thoughts down on paper, however secretly, he is in a sense writing for publication.
I have been driven by causes in almost every major endeavor in my life, beginning when I was a 16-year-old in Southern California where I wrote and published my own newspaper.
I like to joke that I probably hold the world record for rejection letters. Yes, the truth is that I was fed up of being rejected repeatedly, and self-publication was an act of defiance at traditional publishing. But life works in strange ways.
I dreamed of having a book of my own, of writing one that I could put on a shelf.
My theory is that sometimes writers write books because they want to read them, and they aren't there to be read. And I think that was true of me.
When I got laid off, I would write my friends these 15-page-long emails. This was before people had personal emails, and my friends would tell me that I was going to get them fired if I kept sending them stuff, so I started a website.
I have now a library of nearly nine hundred volumes, over seven hundred of which I wrote myself.
I don't read anything anymore. I don't have the eyesight. I read my own copy, that's all. I think I've read everything that's worth reading.
