Writing a novel is not merely going on a shopping expedition across the border to an unreal land: it is hours and years spent in the factories, the streets, the cathedrals of the imagination.
I said these trade deals are going to be terrible: we're going to lose manufacturing jobs, factories abroad; the real wages of Americans are not going to rise. People are coming across the border; it has got to be stopped.
Drones don't stop people from coming across the border, they merely tell you that someone is coming across the border.
Working on my first novel, 'Groundswell' - about a woman recovering from a bad breakup who falls in love with surfing - I spent a month south of the border. And when I wasn't writing or surfing, I was eating. A lot.
I've been writing since I was about thirteen but didn't start a book until 2007. I spent four years writing a sci-fi novel before I wrote 'The Bone Season' at nineteen.
I spent four of my five years at Stanford writing a novel I was unable to sell.
I've spent a fair amount of time down at the border.I have watched as these packs of marijuana are on the backs of young men that are walking across the border. They're hauling an average of about 65 pounds, some of them every day they take another load.
During my years of services in the government, I have spent a great deal of time studying and managing the spectrum of threats to our borders as well as the diverse ways in which those threats are moved across the border.
In my experience, given how large the border is and given how many people are coming across the border, I mean, look, if a child can come across the border, and we know there's hundreds of thousands of children that have, then what makes you think that ISIS and terrorists can't?
It may sound paradoxical, but verbal fluency is the product of many hours spent writing about nothing, just as musical fluency is the product of hours spent repeating scales.
I spent a disproportionate amount of my time in a car in L.A. I'm 35 years old. If you add up the hours spent in cars, it would be years.
Ray Bradbury's connections to fantasy, space, cinema, to the macabre and the melancholy, were all born of his years spent running, jumping, galloping through the woods, across the fields, and down the brick-paved streets of Waukegan.
The characters in my novels are my own unrealized possibilities. That is why I am equally fond of them all and equally horrified by them. Each one has crossed a border that I myself have circumvented. It is that crossed border (the border beyond which my own "I" ends) which attracts me most. For beyond that border begins the secret the novel asks about. This novel is not the author's confession; it is an investigation of human life in the trap the world has become.
Erin and I spent four hours shopping for dresses and shoes Tuesday night. She was going all out in her intention to make Chaz regret any decision he'd made that didn't include worshipping at her feet.
I had left the music industry at the end of 2001, after 10 years, and had spent three years writing every single day - producing two unpublished novels, one abandoned novel, and three unproduced screenplays. The word 'no' and I were on more than nodding terms. The word 'no' and I were talking about going on holiday together.
What does have a chance of becoming law is a process that begins with securing the border. Currently the border is not secure and not just immigrants are coming across, but also drugs, weapons a whole series of problems. And I think that if you can prove to the American people that illegal immigration is under control, I think that the American people are willing to do something very reasonable about people who have been here for many years, who are not criminals, who are going to pay a fine, who are going to pay taxes, who are working.
When I was 22 years old, I thought girls would like me if I wrote a novel. I spent so much time writing that I was thrown out of graduate school.