For years, I've pushed the idea of a column compilation book mainly because it would be easy - I could just staple 'em all together. But publishers have been resistent, feeling the material dates.
I've been homeschooling for eight years and have always received the best advice and encouragement from other homeschoolers, rather than a book or lecture.
From a good book, I want to be taken to the very edge. I want a glimpse into that outer darkness.
In the early 1980s, I wrote a book called 'The Complete Guide to Financial Privacy.' If I would write that book today, it would be a pamphlet. There is precious little privacy left.
I will not write a lame follow-up. It could take me 20 years. But I will never turn in a book that I'm not happy with.
I have never appreciated a quiet moment with a friend as much, a quiet moment with a book and I think part of that is my obsession with being older and time going faster and it's become increasingly sweeter for me.
When a woman gets dressed up to go out at night, she wants to give 50% away, and hold the rest back. If you're an open book, there's no allure.
Once I planned to write a book of poems entirely about the things in my pocket. But I found it would be too long; and the age of the great epics is past.
Two must-haves for me are a great book and my iPod.
People have given me classified information, but always with the disclaimer 'This can never end up in a book.' And it never does.
One of my favorite stories growing up was 'A Wrinkle in Time'. I loved that book.
I am a very linear thinker, so I write beginning to end. I write hundreds of pages per book that never make it into print.
One book at a time... though I'm usually doing the research for others while I'm writing, but that sort of research is fairly desultory and I like to stick to the book being written - and writing a book concentrates the mind so the research is more productive.
I work for two years on a book and it comes out and two days later I've got my first e-mail: When is the next one coming out?
People wanted more advice. So I finally thought I could totally put this advice into a book.
'American Gods' was designed to be, if not open-ended, at least a trilogy kind of shape, so there's definitely one more book, probably another couple of books there to get written.
A great writer is a great writer... Tolstoy was not a woman, but 'Anna Karenina' is still a pretty good book.
One of the pleasantest things about book writing is that sometimes it brings one in touch with old friends.
I never thought I would write about the Book of Revelation. It's so dense; it's so complex and puzzling. But then I found I was thinking about a number of themes, one of which has to do with politics and religion.
Robert Mapplethorpe asked me to write our story the day before he died. I had never written a book of nonfiction, and so it took me almost two decades to write that book.
One day I was in Starbucks going through one of my books on accounting, and this beautiful young woman came up to me and said, 'My accounting book is different from yours.' Her name was Joyce, she had a background in finance and administration and ran a surgery center. Within a short time, we were married.
I coauthored my first nonfiction book by the time I was 25. I have been involved in nonfiction documentaries, newspapers, TV and internet since that time.
I will get a loan and pay the money the court asks for. But I will not lay down my writing and I still say this was an important book to write.
As an old reporter, we have a few secrets, and the first thing is we try the phone book.
Writing Part of the Scenery has been a very different experience. I have been reminded of people and events, real and imaginary which have been part of my life. This book is a celebration of the land which means so much to me.
Now, I - for several years while I was researching this book, I felt quite obsessed by thoughts about sentencing, punishment, how judges arrive at their decisions.
I don't get far enough into a boring book to hate it.
The unflattering reviews are painful for short periods of time; the badly written ones are deeply, deeply insulting. That reviewer took no time to really read the book.
If anybody reads a story in a magazine or book, different pictures compete in their minds.
Making a mix CD - albeit slightly old school - is generally a pretty cool gift and something I like to receive, or giving someone a book that moved you. Writing an inscription inside makes it even better.
When you save book reports, art projects and put them in a scrapbook, it shows a kid you care and you are taking an interest in their lives.
I never travel without my sketch book.
There was a time, as a young comic book reader, that I would have proclaimed 'Deadworld' my favorite series.
My first book didn't even have a Canadian publisher. And that upset me, because I so wanted a readership up there.
What a sense of superiority it gives one to escape reading some book which everyone else is reading.
I first got to know Charles in the late seventies when I wrote an article and then a book about him and I think at the time he came across as quite appealing, it was probably the height of his popularity.
