I will say overwhelmingly what means so much more to me than the opinion of one reviewer are the letters I get from fans who tell me how a particular book has changed their life.
How much of a book review is about the reviewer? Sometimes it's mostly about the reviewer!
I don't think anybody reads a book of poetry front to back. Editors and reviewers only. I don't think anybody else does.
I'm constantly revising. Once the book is written and typed, I go through the entire draft again.
He could have made it right with the book. But he hasn't. He is a revisionist of history. He has lied.
Every time you revisit a book, you get something else out of it.
I read Slash's book because we were on the road together with Velvet Revolver when that came out.
I do the same kind of rewriting that I do in the shorts that I do in long books - and that is a lot. The book really comes to life in the rewriting.
My first book, about Ruby Ridge, was made into a miniseries on CBS in 1996, and since then, I've dabbled in Hollywood, pitched a few things, sold a couple of screenplays and a pilot that I wrote with a buddy from Spokane, flirted with seeing 'Citizen Vince' as a film, and most recently, adapted 'The Financial Lives of the Poets' as a script.
I can say pretty confidently that I am not the right guy to do a superhero movie, just because I was not a comic book kid. I don't know that mythology, and I don't have it ingrained in me in the way that a lot of these other directors do.
I don't think I'm the right man to adapt a book.
I don't see that my age has anything to do with what is between the covers of my book, any more than the fact that I am right-handed. It's a fact of my biography, but it's uninteresting.
After you've lived with somebody for 11 years, what's a guy in a robe reading from a book going to change?
My way of finding a book is to go on Emma Roberts' reading list.
I was sitting in the toilet and I was by myself. I was tired of playing with the roller, so I said I'd better write a book.
'Fast Food Nation' appeared as an article in 'Rolling Stone' before it was a book, so I was extending it from the article, and by that time, everyone could read the article.
To be honest, I chose romance because writing a book seemed so dauntingly long. I looked around for something short, discovered Harlequin romances, and decided to read a few to see if I could do it.
The rosary was said every evening. I always liked that sentence about the medieval Churches, that they were the Bibles of the poor. The Church was my first book and I would think it is still my most important book.
If you were placing bets on which author would write the tenderest, most moving book about fatherhood, Philip Roth would probably come in at the bottom of the list.
It would be wrong to say I enjoy having rows, because that would be un-Christian. If people attack me, then I respond, or if they do very wicked things. Then they must be brought to book.
