exclusive author interviews (showing 1-50 of 57)
November 2009Barbara Kingsolver
"The essential ingredient of authorship is authority. You hunt it out in a library, you chase it down the street, or you knit it from the fiber of your own will. From somewhere, you get it. You begin."...more
November 2009John Irving
"For 12 novels the last sentence has come first, and not even the punctuation has changed. From that last sentence I make my way in reverse through the plot, because there always is a plot—I love plot—to where I think the story should begin."...more
November 2009Jonathan Lethem
"While New York is never named in this apocalyptic phantasmagoria, Delany is a child of Harlem and Greenwich Village, and Dhalgren is really a beautifully allegorized New York coming-of-age novel, albeit with two suns in the sky."...more
November 2009Gail Carriger
"Simply put, it was the book I kept looking for and really wanted to read but no one was writing, so I figured I'd better do it myself."...more
October 2009Audrey Niffenegger
"I am not naturally given to the romantic or the lighthearted. I realized when I was about halfway into Time Traveler that it was so dark and so bleak that no one would read it. So I had to get in there and start balancing that."...more
October 2009Nick Hornby
"I'm frustrated by how much time has slipped by in my own life, and I've wasted more time than most, but I'm not sure I'd feel any better if I'd been more productive. For a start, my first couple of books were a product of all the times I'd wasted at football matches and in record stores."...more
October 2009Eoin Colfer
"When I read [Neuromancer] I realized that sci-fi could be literature. There are no boundaries that we cannot explore or indeed break through. Gibson brought and continues to bring science fiction to the mainstream market. Everybody loves him. Also a helluva storyteller."...more
October 2009Dacre Stoker
"The modern horror master [Stephen King] is one of my all-time favorites. This book modernizes the genre as a realistic horror story with modern-day vampires in small town Maine—very eerie indeed."...more
September 2009James Ellroy
"To me, there's nothing on earth other than women. It's why I get out of bed every morning. You have the opportunity to have a cup of coffee, write, serve God, and you may damn well meet a woman. And that's something to get out of bed for every morning. I'm a big, big, big, big romantic, and this is my most romantic novel."...more
September 2009Anita Diamant
"Writing about the ancient Near East in 1500 B.C.E. means that no one can really challenge my recipe for goat stew. The closer you get to modern times, the easier it is to make mistakes...My goal, in all my novels, is to convey a sense of how it might have happened, and what it might have felt like."...more
September 2009Sue Monk Kidd
"One of my all-time favorite books about a wise and funny young woman who has managed to escape her poor life in Kentucky without getting pregnant (this being her main goal growing up), and the three-year-old Native American girl she 'inherits' on her road trip. The novel's beauty and brilliance are the deepening way this unlikely pair become mother and daughter."...more
August 2009Rebecca Wells
"I love the moon, and I always have. I have this horrible habit of staying up, almost all night long...so I love going outside and looking at the different phases of the moon and watching her grow—and I know I'm not the only person who does that. And I know that I am not the only woman who does this. "...more
August 2009Lev Grossman
"I think everybody feels a bit out of place in life—like they've been slightly miscast or incorrectly routed. We're wired to expect the world to be brighter and more meaningful and more obviously interesting than it actually is. And when we realize that it isn't, we start looking around for the real world."...more
August 2009Brad Kessler
"Basho shows that a haiku can express as much—more—than a page of prose. It's not the amount of words you throw at a given thing—but the words one chooses."...more
July 2009Alice Hoffman
"Siblings can grow up in the same house and live in the same room and experience similar traumas, and still be so different. Parents and children live in separate worlds. To think that you know what your child's life is like, or what your mother's life is like—no matter how close you are—you can never really know."...more
July 2009Chris Anderson
"When people really love a book, when they feel a book is right for them, enough people still want the physical form, the classic form of the book on their shelf. They are inspired enough by the digital sample to buy the real thing, and that will increase demand, not suppress it. "...more
July 2009Sophie Kinsella
"Holidays are all about indulgence, and there's nothing more indulgent than opening one of these books and sinking into the happy, sunlit world of P.G. Wodehouse."...more
July 2009Gigi Levangie Grazer
"I adore anything I've ever read by Roald Dahl. His imagination is unsurpassed—whether it's his characters or his fanciful use of language. And the illustrations by Quentin Blake are matchless. I'll be reading this to my boys this summer."...more
June 2009Lisa See
"History is written by the victors, so isn't it up to us to look deeper, think harder, and learn so we aren't doomed to repeat our mistakes? Obviously what happened to Chinese Americans in the past is a disgrace and an embarrassment, but there are things happening right now that recall those days."...more
June 2009China Miéville
"I was interested in steeping myself in both Eastern and Mid-European writing, and classic crime fiction. I was focused a lot on fidelity to the paradigm, so no "cheating," no last-minute evidence, no characters appearing at the last second, and so on. I wanted a fan of the genre to feel I'd played fair. "...more
June 2009Elizabeth Strout
"These stories are jewels. I allow myself only one a night because they are so perfect and full, and I don't want to lessen the effect. Full of direct and human truths, they are like a friend."...more
May 2009Elmore Leonard
"I don't have a computer. I order about 50 unlined yellow pads at a time from a print shop. I like them, because you don't have to be orderly about the writing without the lines. Some of my longhand is barely decipherable, because I'm just writing fast as I think about it, as the characters talk back and forth. "...more
May 2009Alexander McCall Smith
"I think it is important to remember that, in spite of [HIV], countries in sub-Saharan Africa keep going as best they can, and therefore we should not concentrate exclusively on writing about the bad things in Africa. There is plenty of good news, and there are many very good things happening there, so why should we not celebrate these?"...more
May 2009Sarah Dessen
"I read a lot of books with my toddler daughter, and this is hands down my favorite. Olivia is loud, dreamy, loves art and books and wears everyone out. She may be a pig, but she's a great role model for little girls."...more
April 2009Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni
"Impassioned and inventive, Nobel Prize winner Neruda is a poet who stays on your mind. His intense love poems created a bit of a scandal when Twenty Love Poems was published, but in this book he writes out of a different kind of love: love for the ordinary objects of this world, objects we so often take for granted: an artichoke, onions, soap, his own socks."...more
April 2009Joyce Carol Oates
"I consider myself a thoroughly American writer in the tradition of the great psychological realists—Melville, Hawthorne, Henry James—who nonetheless delve into the mythic and emblematic. Some of my "gothic" fiction is akin to Edgar Allan Poe, who wrote of the nightmare side of America while steadfastly refusing to acknowledge anything remotely historical, timely, or local in his fiction."...more
April 2009Arthur Phillips
"[Musicians] are doing "it" right in front of us. They are experiencing heavy emotion, emotion we envy. And they are moving our bodies, literally, from a distance. And they are inspiring us to feel something more deeply than many of us can feel in private. Under these circumstances, it's actually rather remarkable the entire audience doesn't rush the stage and declare their love."...more
March 2009Jodi Picoult
"This is such an amazing issue. It takes one of the big, knockdown, drag 'em out controversies in this country, which is abortion rights, and it takes it one step further. It's asking, beyond that, who gets to decide what makes a valuable life? To me, that is a really interesting question, and it just seemed like the biggest, hottest mess."...more
March 2009Dan Simmons
"I love unreliable narrators. When I realized I was going to go with Wilkie Collins as my narrator, it was joyous. First of all, he's a serious drug addict, taking tremendous amounts of laudanum every day and shooting morphine at night to sleep. And second, he was a little crazy."...more
March 2009Chris Ayres
"I think of this novel as being the 1930s pop-culture equivalent of Tina Fey's 30 Rock. The plot sees a nature correspondent named William Boot being sent to Africa through a case of mistaken identity to cover a war. His many blunders include packing a canoe, just in case. Having been sent into combat under similar circumstances, I can vouch that none of this is as far-fetched as it reads."...more
February 2009Christopher Moore
"Why are we fascinated with vampires? Because they're scary, sexy, cool. All at once. That's a lot of emotion wrapped around one monster. I mean, zombies are scary, but no one wants to shag them."...more
February 2009Alain de Botton
"Adolescents who can't get a date are in a uniquely privileged position: They will have the perfect chance to get grounding in world literature. There is perhaps an important connection between love and reading, there is perhaps a comparable pleasure offered by both."...more
February 2009Maeve Binchy
"The Irish love telling stories, and we are suspicious of people who don't have long, complicated conversations. There used to be a rule in etiquette books that you should invite four talkers and four listeners to a dinner party. That doesn't work in Ireland, because nobody knows four listeners."...more
February 2009Jamie Ford
"I remember what an oddity my own parents were. My dad was Chinese and my mom was Betty Crocker white—an unusual pairing in the '60s. Growing up, the only two Asian men that I knew of with Caucasian wives were Bruce Lee and my dad. "...more
January 2009Azar Nafisi
"I think every book is a risk. If you want to get at the truth, you take a risk. But this book is the riskiest because it is so personal. "...more
January 2009Josh Bazell
"I wanted to explore the extent to which people can change themselves. So I needed extremes, and since I wanted the character to end up as a doctor, it seemed reasonable to have him start out as a killer."...more
December 2008Malcolm Gladwell
"[Outliers] was conceived in a period in which CEOs were bringing down huge paychecks, patting themselves on the back, and arguing that they deserved it and that their success was of their own making. I was curious about that — is it true? Is it a fair assessment to say that highly successful people deserve all the credit for their achievement?"...more
December 2008John Grogan
"I hope that readers can relate on many levels. The kids my age were growing up during the social upheaval of the '60s and '70s, and we were hardwired to question authority. We're all sons and daughters, and we all have to make our peace with our parents and their values to find our own place in the world. That's really what this story is about."...more
December 2008Dennis Lehane
"I never have a strong sense of my plots — I usually know something about what has to happen at the end...but beyond that I'm just throwing spaghetti on the wall to see what sticks. If you work hard enough at this method, you get a real nice pasta dish, but you also spend a fair amount of time picking noodles off the floor and throwing them away."...more
November 2008Anita Shreve
"I first began thinking about the risks of (very) underage drinking. Usually, it's a single risky or careless moment with catastrophic consequences that intrigues me. "...more
November 2008Anne Rice
"The supernatural world has always been more real to me than the real world. I feel a great surge of energy when I acknowledge that there is a world beyond this one. In my early novels I made up stories about forces that I sensed. Now I write about faith in something in which I completely believe. "...more
October 2008Thomas Frank
"We have lots of theories about what's wrong with Washington, but they tend to be the theories developed by the right back in the 1970s about liberals. Liberalism is the root of all evil, and when someone does something wrong it is because they've become more liberal. But that theory really doesn't hold water, and very obviously so. My object was to come up with the theory for the conservative state — what made it tick. "...more
October 2008Dick Morris
"Fleeced talks about the rip-offs that we're exposed to on a daily basis in the United States, which we're seeing coming home to roost on the stock market and with the financial crisis....we have a whole chapter devoted to how the sub-prime crisis got started. We make the point that the people who precipitated that are now long gone. They're not the big Wall Street houses that are going broke now — those are the people who are left holding the paper."...more
September 2008Neal Stephenson
"I see this as more and more of a social class issue. I'm remembering the advent of late '60s/early '70s drug culture when I was a kid. Authority figures would try to scare us away from drugs, and whether or not we were actually using drugs, we would just laugh at them because their threats and warnings seemed so overwrought."...more
September 2008Diane Johnson
"Rather more directly than usual, though I think of all my novels — and maybe all novels — as political in some sense. My immediate interest was engaged by living part of the year in France, where there is a large Muslim population"...more
September 2008Neil Gaiman
"You don't get explanations in real life. You just get moments that are absolutely, utterly, inexplicably odd. Like everybody in the world, I've had moments that are absolutely, utterly, inexplicably odd. I actually wrote about one of them in my latest book"...more
August 2008Selden Edwards
"As soon as I chose 1897 Vienna as my setting, I began reading everything I could find about the period, and I really fell in love with it. Carl Schorske's Vienna: Fin de Siecle was my favorite and most valued source. But I developed a library of over 50 books"...more
July 2008Rob Walker
"I admit that I certainly counted myself among those who figured I was brandproof. After all, I'm a journalist who writes about this stuff for a living, so if anybody can "see through" it, it's me. Then Nike bought Converse."...more
July 2008Christina Schwarz
"I'm interested in the idea that reality is subjective, that each person observes a single event in a different way. That, in itself, is a story to me."...more
June 2008Jackie Collins
"I write what I want, not what editors and publishers tell me to do. I walk my own path, and it seems to have worked out for me. Twenty-six books is quite an achievement, and I plan to write 26 more!"...more
