When a book raises your spirit, and inspires you with noble and manly thoughts, seek for no other test of its excellence. It is good, and made by a good workman.
Writing a book is usually a full-time job that takes years. I didn't have years. So I decided to crowdsource content for the book.
You know, now it's sinking in. It's taken me a long time to realize - and it is sinking in - how important this book is. And I have a certain distance now. I've done it such a long time ago.
Linda Svendsen's 'Marine Life' was important. I was nearly 22. Larry Mathews discussed the book in a creative writing class. We examined her stories, figured out how they worked.
With stand-up, I can have an idea, go down the street to a comedy club and work on it, flesh it out, book a venue, people will come, then film it. I do all that myself; I never have to answer to anybody.
When I came back to Washington to be The Times' chief congressional correspondent in 1991, I was looking for a book subject, and Ted Kennedy stood out for two reasons.
I just write the sort of book that I would enjoy reading myself, a book that is both scholarly and recreates the experience of people at that time.
I didn't get into music to become a blues musician, or a country musician. I'm a singer-songwriter. In my book that means I get to do whatever I want.
My first book, 'To Be or Not To Be,' took 'Hamlet' and converted it to the choose-your-own-path format. It was a great fit for a book where you control what happens - a book as game - because the plot of 'Hamlet' is very game-like: get a mission from a ghost to kill the final boss, kill the final boss, and game over. You win.
Don Quixote's 'Delusions' is an excellent read - far better than my own forthcoming travel book, 'Walking Backwards Across Tuscany.'
The book has many different characteristics: some are extremely old-fashioned storytelling traits, but there are also a fair number of postmodern traits, and the self-consciousness is one.
'Marley and Me' was a book I was proud of and believed in, but I thought it would just have a modest audience because it is such a personal story about my marriage and my family.
I was pleasantly surprised after the book came out. It was like, hey, the home team put down a nice score.
I started writing with intent to publish on January 1st, 1985, when, as my New Year's resolution, I resolved to finish a book before I turned 25. It's one of only a few New Year's resolutions I remember keeping - I finished that one with a couple weeks to spare.
I come up with a blurb at the beginning, but the book will always be completely different by the time it's finished. They say, 'Where's the book you were going to write?' And I say, 'Forget about it. It doesn't exist.'
I never thought that Trump was going to run for president, but I was very firmly on record, including in the book that I wrote before, 'Adios, America,' as saying that Republicans should stop wasting their time with these novelty candidates.
I would say that, in the future, the book will be reserved for things that function best as a book. So, if I need a textbook that's going to be out of date because of new technological inventions, you're better off having it where you can download the supplements or the update.
The clue to book jacket photography is to look friendly and approachable, but not too glamorous.
My idea of a good time is creating something and reading a good book.
I think that writing texts, publishing texts, selling texts in a physical book store is one of the important tools for breeding this new generation.
It helps when 1 can send the children off to their fathers so I can support my new book with a national publicity tour. I started writing the book when my daughter was 5. It took me almost four years.
The most technologically efficient machine that man has ever invented is the book.
Never read a book through merely because you have begun it.
I'm very perverse. If someone tells me I have to read a book, I'm instantly disinclined to do so.
It's just a matter of writing the kind of book I enjoy reading. Something better be happening at the beginning, and then on every page after, or I get irritated.
I think if Roman Polanski had asked me to do the phone book, I would have said, 'Yes.'
I'm very grateful for social media. I think it has shown people my true nature, and through that has come a book deal, and I think it certainly contributes to people's view of me as a person with a sense of humor, which is only helpful in my industry.
Politics is not a bad profession. If you succeed there are many rewards, if you disgrace yourself you can always write a book.
I haven't said this yet, and I think I will say it. I stand by every word in the Hillary book to this day.
I was incredibly determined - I wrote short stories, I wrote the beginnings of novels. I wrote a little children's book and sent it to the editor-in-chief of the children's division of Simon and Schuster and she asked me to write a little children's book for a series she was doing.
I don't know how the editors are going to take it or how it may be received. But to some extent I'm hoping that with the next book, when people pick it up and read it, it will scare the pants off of them.
My whole outlook on life is, never judge a book by its cover.
Collaboration on a book is the ultimate unnatural act.
Somewhere along the line, I realized that I liked telling stories, and I decided that I would try writing. Ten years later, I finally got a book published. It was hard. I had no skills. I knew nothing about the business of getting published. So I had to keep working at it.
In the 1950s we use to feel that television was taking away our comic readership; with today's exciting, powerfully visual movies I have to wonder about their effect on the kids' loyalty to the comic book medium all over again.
I'm basically a know-it-all, and I'm writing a book about it. I want it to be called 'Danson on Water' and have me on the cover in this Christlike pose, standing on the water.
