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.