I loved writing a book in which, in some ways, it’s very, very classical, and in some ways I’m breaking lots of rules about what you can do and what you can’t do.
I suspect there are two kinds of novelists. Those who have a point of view and have something to say and then write a novel in order to say that thing, and those of us who write the book in order to find out what we think about that thing.
I’ll agonize over sentences. Mostly because you’re trying to create specific effects with sentences, and because there are a number of different voices in the book.
I’m never, I hope, stupid enough to believe that Twitter or blogging or any of this stuff is a substitute for actually doing the work or writing a book.
In many ways, it was much, much harder to get the first book contract. The hardest thing probably overall has been learning not to trust people, publicists and so forth, implicitly.
So the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund is out there preserving and fighting for, and sometimes winning and sometimes losing, the fight for First Amendment rights in comics and, more generally, for freedom of speech.
This is a book for every fiddler who has realized halfway through playing an ancient Scottish air that the Ramones “I Wanna Be Sedated” is what folk music is really all about, and gone straight into it.
The cartoon me writes the books cartoon people read in the cartoon world, because they need things to read there too.
I think if you decide that any book is about Only One Thing you’re probably wrong. Even if that thing is in there.
He would go somewhere no one knew him, and he would sit in a library all day and read books and listen to people breathing.
People talk about books that write themselves, and it’s a lie. Books don’t write themselves. It takes thought and research and backache and notes and more time and more work than you’d believe.
I took delight in hurling books across the room if I knew I would not be reading the second chapter. Then I’d go and pick them up again, because they are books, after all, and we are not savages.
Television and cinema were all very well, but these stories happened to other people. The stories I found in books happened inside my head. I was, in some way, there. It’s the magic of fiction: you take the words and you build them into worlds.
I decided that I would do my best in the future not to write books just for money. If you didn’t get the money then you didn’t have anything. If I did the work I was proud of and I didn’t get the money, at least I’d have the work.
I wondered if that was true: if they were all really children wrapped up in adult bodies, like children’s books hidden in the middle of dull, long adult books, the kind with no pictures or conversations.
I was not scared of anything, when I read my book...
When I was 7, my proudest possession would have been my bookshelf ’cause I had alphabetized all of the books on my bookshelf.
A disturbing novel about dreams and wishes, a nightmarish distaff monkey’s paw of a book that it’s impossible to forget. Lisa Tuttle remains our preeminent chronicler of family madness and desire.
I was writing the kind of comic that would make me, at age 26 or 27, go down to a comic book store every month and spend my $2. That was my starting point. I wanted to write a comic that I would read. And that’s still my agenda.
Going off the grid is always good for me. It’s the way that I’ve started books and finished books and gotten myself out of deadline dooms and things.