And when I was young my family was perfectly nice. I write a lot about it as you noticed. But it was rather limited. I think I don't think anyone in my family would really feel I'd done them an injustice by saying that. We didn't see many people. There were many books. It was as if I wanted to get away from home.

I've never had a divorce but I've seen so many of my friends my sister my family go through that stuff so I try to write for the people that can't write about it. I take on their sorrow so I'm able to kind of express it or their joy.

In times when religious or political faith or hope predominates the writer functions totally in unison with society and expresses society's feelings beliefs and hopes in perfect harmony.

That bedrock faith that I could write was what blinded me to attempts to discourage me.

You just kind of have faith. If that sounds kind of mystical it's because I really don't know how it works but I trust that it does. I try to write the way I read in order to find out what happens next.

I just can't say enough about the actors having faith and trust in the writers and the writers having faith and trust in the actors.

Writers now are putting total faith in designers at Apple and Amazon. It's almost like a race-car driver having no input into how cars are designed.

My gut feeling about sequels is that they should be premeditated: You should try to write a trilogy first or at least sketch out a trilogy if you have any faith in your film.

In a mood of faith and hope my work goes on. A ream of fresh paper lies on my desk waiting for the next book. I am a writer and I take up my pen to write.

But whatever my failure I have this thing to remember - that I was a pioneer in my profession just as my grandfathers were in theirs in that I was the first man in this section to earn his living as a writer.

Every book I've written has been a different attempt to understand something and the success or failure of the previous one is irrelevant. I write the book I want.

That sense of failure I don't know where people put it who don't write songs and aren't able to emote physically. It must go somewhere.

I have always been pushed by the negative. The apparent failure of a play sends me back to my typewriter that very night before the reviews are out. I am more compelled to get back to work than if I had a success.

The most important training though is to experience life as a writer questioning everything inventing multiple explanations for everything. If you do that all the other things will come if you don't there's no hope for you.

But because we've all been readers we know what the experience is like and we hope that what certain writers have given to us we will give to someone.

My advice would be to write what is most personal and specific to your experience or your life. And your voice will emerge and because of its specificity it will be universal.

I had decided I wanted to write about food and I knew the only way to do that is to speak with authority which meant learning the language and knowing what that experience is like.

I have been blessed in many ways and one of those is to have been born in Africa for me a great treasure house of stories. I have been researching it since my infancy reading about it talking to men and women who have spent their lives in this land living it as I have and loving it as I do. I write almost entirely from my own experience.

A twenty-one-year-old writer is likely to be inhibited by a lack of usable experience. Childhood and adolescence were something I knew.

In my experience an appreciative letter from a fellow writer means a lot.

I don't think any good book is based on factual experience. Bad books are about things the writer already knew before he wrote them.

You can use your means in a good and bad way. In German-speaking art we had such a bad experience with the Third Reich when stories and images were used to tell lies. After the war literature was careful not to do the same which is why writers began to reflect on the stories they told and to make readers part of their texts. I do the same.

I'm a method writer. In order to write about the emotion I have to experience it. I get physically tired and exhausted devoting hours and hours and hours to it.

The fact that I am a writer comes from the experience of being cut away from my roots and living in Venezuela where I couldn't find a place for myself for years and years.