It used to be that the highest ambition of American novelists was to write 'the Great American Novel,' that great white whale of American fiction that would encompass all the American experience in one great book.
People had this image of the Jacksons as the perfect American family and I destroyed that image. But what people have to understand is writing that book was very healing for me.
I have to write three books a year to make a reasonable living out of writing - unless, of course, she gets a major American film deal. Phryne has been optioned since the very first book, but to make a historical TV movie, it costs $30,000 a day extra for the historical detail to be correct, so most people aren't doing it.
Won't it be wonderful when black history and native American history and Jewish history and all of U.S. history is taught from one book. Just U.S. history.
All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn.
As I detail in my new book: 'Hard Measures, How Aggressive CIA Actions After 9/11 Saved American Lives,' there are many myths surrounding the detention of a relatively small number of top terrorists at CIA-run 'black sites' from 2002 until they were sent to Guantanamo Bay in 2006.
The world is lousy with Arab princes. And if we could have got Osama bin Laden, and saved at some point down the road 3,000 American lives, a few less Arab princes would have been OK in my book.
In my book I don't just demonstrate that free enterprise is the most efficient way of organizing an economy - which it is. I also show that it's an expression of American values, and, thus, that a fight for free enterprise is very much a fight for our culture.
I wrote my book 'The Amorous Busboy Of Decatur Avenue' completely like a writer does, writing it down, re-writing everything. But in my stand-up, I improvise initially, never questioning it too closely.
When I wrote my book about Amsterdam, the main objective was to talk about the city's creativity rather than just its design.
The last book I read was Noam Chomsky on anarchism; maybe I will become an anarchist.
I'm a book guy first, and my education came from two encyclopedias. One was an encyclopedia of health, so I became morbidly obsessed with anatomy, and I thought I had trichinosis, an aneurism, jaundice! And then an encyclopedia of art.
Every book is a quotation; and every house is a quotation out of all forests, and mines, and stone quarries; and every man is a quotation from all his ancestors.
I just feel that 'The Color Purple,' which was my 10th book, was a true gift from my ancestors.
I've tried to show in my most recent book, the 'Irresistible Fairytale', that in order to talk about any genre, particularly what we call simple genre - a myth, a legend, an anecdote, a tall tale, and so on - we really have to understand something about the origin of stories all together.
The 'EU in a Nutshell' is a miscellany of facts and anecdotes about the system which rules us. It's a book you can delve into in pursuit of a particular fact, or crack open for entertainment at virtually any page.
I'm in the middle of my sixth book, which is about animals at the Los Angeles Zoo.
The President's announcement sounded less like a national energy plan than like a page from an election-year play book. This Administration's plan to reduce obscene oil company profits is to regulate them less.
When I started 'Case Histories,' the characters were all going to Antarctica on a cruise. The first part was called 'Embarkation.' It was supposed to be about everyone preparing to embark on the cruise, but it mushroomed into an entire book.
Many years, I would publish four books - an anthology, a book of criticism, a new book of poems, a book of essays.
