I made the mistake of thinking that external accomplishments would bring me peace. I thought it was about the job or a book or making a name for myself.
With the marketing pressures driving the book world today, it's much easier to get the author of a memoir on a television show than a serious novelist.
When a parent says about a book, 'That's not my child's world,' I remind them of the future. Social fluency will be the new currency of success. Not experiencing diversity challenges our kids' future in the global work force. It handicaps them from making America and the world more livable and just.
The problem with making movies is that you have to devote so much of your life to fawning and flattering the men in suits, whereas that doesn't happen in books. You just go and write, and then the book comes out.
If somebody takes the time, a: to read a book that I have written, and then to b: care about it enough to write me and ask questions, surely I owe them a response.
I just did a picture book called The Wildest Brother on Earth, and you will find both of my children in there.
Given the current state of publishing, I think it helps to have a brand name on the cover of your book. Comedians are proven commodities with built-in audiences. They may not have the writing chops of a Dave Eggers, but they're salacious and funny and self-reflective.
When you meet someone for the first time, that's not the whole book. That's just the first page.
The Bible has done more harm than any other book in the world.
I eat 'The Walking Dead' like its made of brains. Can't even watch the show, I love the book so much.
If a book I've committed myself to review turns out to be 'disappointing' I make an effort to present it objectively to the reader, including a good number of excerpts from the text, so that the reader might form his or her own opinion independent of my own.
If you're reading a novel that was written in 1964, you'll find out more about 1964 than if you're reading a nonfiction book written in 1964 because you're hearing how language was actually used and hearing what people's actual concerns were at the beginning of the 1960s.
Other writers definitely influence my writing. What encourages me and inspires me is when I read a good book. It makes me want to be a better writer.
One rainy Sunday when I was in the third grade, I picked up a book to look at the pictures and discovered that even though I did not want to, I was reading. I have been a reader ever since.
A good heavy book holds you down. It's an anchor that keeps you from getting up and having another gin and tonic.
Very often I'll find out at the end of a book what I put in at the beginning. A sort of process of elimination and discovery in one.
'The Dovekeepers' is a fantastic novel written by Alice Hoffman; it was a bestselling novel, and I fell in love with the book and bought the rights to it.
The original theme of 'Beauty and the Beast' is don't judge a book by its cover. Love what's inside.
As I work, I see my writing - each scene, each chapter, each section, each book - in three-act structures and classic myths, and I analyze them through the handy filter of the detective story.
Then one day I thought it would be wonderful to make a whole book, to make my text and my drawings together, and that's how I started doing children's books.
I enjoy my alone time, but I'm an open book.
Long before I was a writer, when I was just a haphazard reader and a dreamer of stories, I learnt about an influential book by Harold Bloom. 'The Anxiety of Influence', published in 1973 when I was five years old, is taken up with the terrifying influence of poets on each other.
I received a grant from The Ford Foundation to write a book for kids about urban perception, or how people experience cities, but I kept putting off writing it. Instead I started to write what became The Phantom Tollbooth.
A lot of people say writers start losing their powers after 60 or 65. But I look at the best-seller list and see a book by that 14-year-old gymnast, Dominique Moceanu, and I think, 'Now, what's she going to tell the world? And these 25-year-old rock stars, what are they going to tell the world?'
Every time I had a book come out, I'm like, 'Is it going to be number one?'
The characters in the book grow up with us. My voice has broken as well.
There's this stress that is relieved when you realize somebody understands, and that's only going to happen if you feel the person who's writing the book or the people in the TV show aren't holding back.
One always tends to overpraise a long book, because one has got through it.
It works in the comic book, but as the audiences have gotten older and more sophisticated, I think the stories need to grow up with them. This is a story about a couple of rival gangs and what goes wrong in a couple of days.
I can't pick out one single book that had such a profound personal impact.
My favorite book is the last one printed, which is always better than those that were published earlier.
When you write a book, you're an expert, and people look at you in a different way.
I thought, if ever there were a time to write a book about hope, it's now.
The book is there for inspiration and as a foundation, the fundamentals on which to build.
At school I was always trying to con my teachers into letting me act out book reports instead of writing them.
Pan me, don't give me the part, publish everybody's book but this one and I will still make it!
