My address book of dealers and private collectors, smugglers and fixers, agents, runners and the peculiar assortment of art hangers-on was longer than anyone else's in the field.
I can only write a book like 'The Tin Drum' or 'From the Diary of a Snail' at a special period of my life. The books came about because of how I felt and thought at the time.
It is customary for the writer to sneer that Hollywood has traduced their book. Well, I adore my film.
I'd love to do a book with scratch n' sniff pages and pieces of string and plastic attached to the pages, you know?
I'm snobby about books that aren't crime fiction: if I start reading a literary novel and there's no mystery emerging in the first few pages, I'm like, 'Gah, this obviously isn't a proper book. Why would I want to carry on reading it?'
A lot of poets too live on the margins of social acceptance, they certainly aren't in it for the money. William Blake - only his first book was legitimately published.
As a child, I had no interest in science whatsoever - then I started writing and recognized how relevant it was. My first book about science and medicine captured the world of organ transplantation in 1989 from the points of view of all of the participants - scientists, surgeons, social workers, organ recipients and even donor families.
I didn't know anything about '12 Years a Slave.' Not the book, not Solomon Northup, which I was quite shocked by, once I'd read it, that it wasn't a seminal text. I think it deserves to be.
I think my background in film taught me that a great book adaptation is not always slavishly faithful to the source material.
My first book was on the grittier side of life. A week before being published, I realized all of my main characters come from single households. That was something that, when I lived in South Bronx, that's what it was like.
I'm obsessed with Nicholas Sparks. I've literally read every single book, because every time I travel, at the airport, I always buy a new Nicholas Sparks book.
Spiderman was my favorite comic book character growing up. I'm a geek, so I love the fact Peter Parker is into science. And I gravitate towards short guys. I'm 5' 9" now, but in junior high, I got picked on because I was 4' 8".
Giving consumers the choice of having it all in one big bite means different viewers are in many different places in the book, making it hard to discuss without spoiling the plot. The intervals between first-run programming provide a space for communion and that tantalizing sense of anticipation.
Before I went off to Rutgers, I worked in a comic book shop in my hometown. At night, I would work on some comic stories, and after a while, I developed an idea for a weird little superhero spoof comic called 'Cement Shooz.'
'John Henry Days' was already half in the can before my first book came out, so I'd already started something that was big and sprawling - I just had to finish it.
I felt more doubtful than usual with 'Goon Squad,' because I knew that the book's genre wasn't easily named - Novel? Stories? Novel-in-stories? - and I worried that its lack of a clear category would count against it. My hopes for it were pretty modest.
Publishing is a business. It's about squeezing every last dollar out of every available source, and the most vulnerable source is the author. No clearer proof of that exists than the 'standard' book contract.
A stage play requires very different craft from a book, fiction or otherwise, and ditto from a screenplay.
Right after college, after growing up in the United States, I moved to India, broadly telling the story of how an old and stagnant country was suddenly waking up. And I came home, back to America, in 2009 after telling that story and writing a book about that.
In a way, I started 'Goon Squad' not even realizing I was writing a book. I thought I was just writing a few stories to stall before starting this other book that I wanted to write - or thought I wanted to write: I still haven't written it.
