If you're writing a novel, you're in a room for three or four years. There's not much coming in from the outside.

If you're writing a novel, you're in a room for three or four years. There's not much coming in from the outside.

If you caricature friends in your first novel they will be upset, but if you don't they will feel betrayed.

I don't hold with shamans, witch doctors, or psychiatrists. Shakespeare, Tolstoy, or even Dickens, understood more about the human condition than ever occurred to any of you. You overrated bunch of charlatans deal with the grammar of human problems, and the writers I've mentioned with the essence.

If you don't count some of Jehovah's injunctions, there are no humorists in the Bible.

A novel may take anywhere from two to five years to write and, in the end, you might manage a couple of thousand dollars on it, no more.

I had, like any other young novelist, started out by believing the difficult thing was to get published and that, once you managed that, well, your financial problems were over. I discovered, like any other serious novelist, that actually they had only just begun.