Losing My Parents Really Set Me Adrift

I Always Tell People, If A Young Girl Read "beloved" As Her First Novel, She'd Have To Kill Either Herself Or Her Mother, Because In "beloved" You Have A Mother Killing Their Children. This Is Not Something A Child Would Accept Very Easily. And Would Never Understand.

Love, As The Poet Says, Is Like The Spring. It Grows On You And Seduces You Slowly And Gently, But It Holds Tight Like The Roots Of A Tree. You Don't Know Until You're Ready To Go That You Can't Move, That You Would Have To Mutilate Yourself In Order To Be Free. That's The Feeling. It Doesn't Last, At Least It Doesn't Have To. But It Holds On Like A Steel Claw In Your Chest. Even If The Tree Dies, The Roots Cling To You. I've Seen Men And Women Give Up Everything For Love That Once Was.

The Way I Write Is This: I Write About A Thousand Words A Day, A Little Bit More. The Next Morning, I Read Those Thousand Words And Cursorily Edit That. Then I Write The Next Thousand. I Do That All The Way To The End Of The Book And Then I Reread The Book Quite A Few Times, Editing As Go Through.

One Of The Things That I Love About Being A Writer Is This. I Wake Up Every Day And I Write For Three Hours. I Wake Up Early. So Like 6:00, 7:00 In The Morning, I Write Till 9:00 Or 10:00. I Live In New York, Nobody Even Is Breathing Until 9:00 Or 10:00 In The Morning. So, It's Like My Writing Life Is Completely Removed From The Rest Of My Life.

One Wouldn't Want To Say That What Makes A Good Writer Is The Number Of Books That The Writer Wrote Because You Could Write A Whole Number Of Bad Books. Books That Don't Work, Mediocre Books, Or There's A Whole Bunch Of People In The Pulp Tradition Who Have Done That. They Just Wrote... And Actually They Didn't Write A Whole Bunch Of Books, They Just Wrote One Book Many Times.