People don't like it when you compare the miracle of childbirth to writing a book, but I think there is some overlap in the two because they are both pure agony.
'The Chimney Sweeper's Boy' began differently from any previous book I'd written. It actually derives from a story a friend - the novel's dedicatee, Patrick Maher - told me.
In 2008, while the film version of my book 'Choke' was coming to market, my mother was diagnosed with lung cancer. That meant that I had to appear in public to promote a comedy about a son trying to save his dying mother - the plot of Choke - while privately I was caring for my own dying mother. It was torture.
Gabriel Garcia Marquez's 'One Hundred Years of Solitude' is such a powerful book, and 'Love in the Time of Cholera' is so strangely, brilliantly optimistic.
It's never easy to adapt a book, especially as the author, because it's as if you're chopping off appendages. It really feels painful to decide what has to go.
When I was 12, I wanted to learn how to play the guitar, and I found a chord book in a shop, and I stuffed it down my trousers. And that's how I learned to play the guitar.
I cite in my book countless examples of the foundational documents of the colonial period in America and the writings of the leaders, that this was intended to be a Christian nation.
It is more than a book, it is an institution which rules the Christian world.
'London' is a gallery of sensation of impressions. It is a history of London in a thematic rather than a chronological sense with chapters of the history of smells, the history of silence, and the history of light. I have described the book as a labyrinth, and in that sense in complements my description of London itself.
I really love 'Bridget Jones's Diary' - and I love the book, too. You wonder how it ever got made into a movie. She's supposed to be chubby, and two of the hottest guys ever are straight-up fighting over her?
When I became obsessed with Winston Churchill, I wrote a book about Churchill. What a joy it was to write that book!
I frankly couldn't imagine being a series mystery-fiction writer, churning out book after book about the same viewpoint character.
My first two books, 'Letters to a Young Brother' and 'Letters to a Young Sister,' were... distributed pretty widely. Judges in juvenile justice facilities started citing the book as required reading.
Civil disobedience is not accepted by religion and the state does not accept it and there are many verses in the Holy Book that talk of following the ruler.
While I began writing 'Rules of Civility' in 2006, the genesis of the book dates back to the early 1990s, when I happened upon a copy of 'Many Are Called,' the collection of portraits that Walker Evans took on the New York City subways in the late 1930s with a hidden camera.
I published 'Rules of Civility' while I was still working. It became a best seller. I was working on this book, and then I decided to retire.
'Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell' by Susanna Clarke is a big, thick book. About a thousand pages in paperback. I've heard several people say the size alone intimidated them.
We do not believe that the Marxist program, which embodies the continuity of the experience of the actual class struggle and real revolutions of the last one hundred and fifty years, is a definitely closed book.
A classic is a book that doesn't have to be written again.
I would only read the novels that people classify as 'beach books' if I were being held prisoner and the only alternative was the 'Book of Mormon.'
