101. I later heard that Erich Maria Remarque had been the editor of a German fashion magazine and decided to quit his job and write a novel. 102. I dug through these issues in my own work, spending my years at Stanford writing a novel about a rent strike in Chicago. 103. I liked that they were stuck up in this house in the middle of nowhere, writing novels. 104. I had never thought about writing a novel. 105. I wanted to write a novel long ago about James Buchanan, an American president, and found I could not bring it off. 106. I thought it would be much better if I wrote the entire novel and sent it out. 107. I was not thinking about writing a novel about the German resistance to Hitler, which is what the book became. 108. I wrote it because I just really, really wanted to write a novel. 109. I detest it when novels are written about the impossibility of writing a novel. 110. If he had become the president, he said, he would have stopped writing novels for five years. |