Novels Are Fictions And Therefore They Tell

I Remember I Thought I Should Become A Doctor, Even Though I Had No Talent For Science Whatsoever. Then Of Course, Until I Was About Sixteen, I Thought I Might Have A Shot As A Major League Baseball Player. But Once I Hit My Full Adolescence I Lost All Interest In That. I Discovered, In Rapid Succession, Books, Girls, Alcohol And Tobacco, And I've Never Turned Back. Those Are The Four Things I'm Most Interested In.

The Joke Is The Purest, Most Essential Form Of Storytelling. Every Word Has To Count.

You See, The Interesting Thing About Books, As Opposed, Say, To Films, Is That It's Always Just One Person Encountering The Book, It's Not An Audience, It's One To One.

For Example, When I Was Writing Leviathan, Which Was Written Both In New York And In Vermont - I Think There Were Two Summers In Vermont, In That House I Wrote About In Winter Journal, That Broken-down House... I Was Working In An Out-building, A Kind Of Shack, A Tumble-down, Broken-down Mess Of A Place, And I Had A Green Table. I Just Thought, "well, Is There A Way To Bring My Life Into The Fiction I'm Writing, Will It Make A Difference?" And The Fact Is, It Doesn't Make Any Difference. It Was A Kind Of Experiment Which Couldn't Fail.

Movies Are Not Novels, And That's Why, When Filmmakers Try To Adapt Novels, Particularly Long Or Complex Novels, The Result Is Almost Always Failure. It Can't Be Done.