Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
What I think happens, and that you have to acknowledge though, is that a director uses a book as a launching pad for his own work and that's always very flattering.
Once in a while, I write in Malay and work on something fun that's more for the local Malaysian market, and when that happens, it's always something really special; it speaks volumes that I'm doing it for my fans who have been there for me since day one.
I'm not much of a plotter. I start off with an inciting incident, and in classic crime fiction what happens is that all the action flows from that incident. It's very comfy when it all ties up and feels like a complete universe, but my stuff doesn't always work that way.
As it happens, although I was at MIT on the faculty full-time for 18 years and then at Harvard for another 16, so I've always been in full-time academia, I always found it was both beneficial for my research and beneficial for the other work to be involved in the practicing community.