They put it on the page because it sounded good or it looked good or they read it in a book somewhere that this is how you structure a script or something, and they just don't get it. It's surprising.
You might have a favorite book or film, but you can only watch or read it so many times before you have to let it sit and then go back and realize it's your favorite still. At some point everything gets a little stale and you have to step away from it.
We have organized lobbyists in favor of Israel. You can't open your mouth. I can call the president of the United States anything in the book, but if you say one thing about Israel, and you're off limits.
Paris and Nicky Hilton? Those girls will show up to the opening of a phone book. It's like a big joke.
I didn't write a book. It wasn't for self-enrichment.
They have a book of locations, and we would do a story about the Sahara Desert for instance, and in the California book you would find a comparable location, to match that location in California.
I think it's a very old and deep-seated double standard that holds that when a man writes about family and feelings, it's literature with a capital L, but when a woman considers the same topics, it's romance, or a beach book - in short, it's something unworthy of a serious critic's attention.
I don't think I'm the right man to adapt a book.
Grade school ruined reading for me by demanding book reports for such snore-a-thons as Benjamin Franklin's biography written for children.
That's the thing: once it's in their hands, it's not my book anymore, it's theirs. I have no idea what happens when they start to digest it. So when someone writes me to explain how they read it, what it was like, what they enjoyed, there's a thrill. Writers who don't make their email addresses public are missing out on something wonderful.
In my book, I was trying to get into my own soul.
One trouble with developing speed reading skills is that by the time you realize a book is boring you've already finished it.
I went to work in 1962, and by '64 I was writing all the time, every night and every weekend. It didn't occur to me that, having read nothing and knowing nothing, I was in no position to write a book.
I was gravely warned by some of my female acquaintances that no woman could expect to be regarded as a lady after she had written a book.
The power of a book lies in its power to turn a solitary act into a shared vision. As long as we have books, we are not alone.
Obviously, there are those in the industry who don't give romance novels the level of respect the sales would warrant. They'll talk about a book that sells maybe 100,000 copies, that happens to be very literary, whereas something like 'Crossfire' will sell 13 million copies in a single language and hardly get any mentions at all.
I think that my main criticism in that book was directed at the general assumption that adaptation characterizes populations and species, rather than simply the individuals in the populations and species.
The only process that comes close to the process of writing a whole book, in my experience, is childbirth. There is this moment when you think you can't possibly labour for another moment, and that, paradoxically, is when you have to push hardest.
Every book I write, the media just keeps punching me in the face.
When my mother read 'The Joy Luck Club', she was always complaining to me how she had to tell her friends that, no, she was not the mother or any of the mothers in the book.
Well, unfortunately, my father passed away before my first book was published, so he never lived to see me as an author. But I think my mum was suitably pleased because she was mad about words. If she ever came across a word that she didn't know, she would always look it up in the dictionary.
I wanted to publish a book simply to be buried with it; that's all I wanted. I had no ambition beyond that.
I knew as far back as 2001 that I would write a book called 'A Visit From the Goon Squad,' though I had no idea what kind of book it would be.
I don't thrive on stress. I love lying on the deck on our houseboat reading a book.
'The Good Soldier' is an odd and maybe even unique book. That it is a masterpiece, almost a perfect novel, comes as a repeated surprise even to readers who have read it before.
Robin McKinley's 'The Blue Sword' was a defining book of my teen years, and I'd love to have more books like that in the world.
I could never have pictured myself writing a book when I was 25 years old. My mom was an English teacher but I wasn't that way growing up.
If I had a personal wish for the new ideas in this new book it would be that every parent, every counselor, every teacher, every professor, every sports coach that deals with young people would understand the three circle concept.
I had no idea that 'Less Than Zero' was going to be read by anyone outside of Los Angeles, and it's - believe me, as the writer of the book I'm somewhat amused and intrigued by the idea that 25 years later it's still out and people are still reading it.
Say I lived until 80 and read a book a month seriously, that means I was looking at 480 books left in my life. If I had only 480 left, I wanted to stop sifting through material I didn't have confidence in and turn my attention to those that I know merited my reading.
Without sounding too pretentious, I was sort of a slave to the narrative. When the narrative cracks in, I have to go where it takes me. I had to go to the Bohemian Grove. It was the obvious end to the book.
Let's just say that I don't think our show has very much in common with the book any more.
Before I was reading science fiction, I read Hemingway. Farewell to Arms was my first adult novel that said not everything ends well. It was one of those times where reading has meant a great deal to me, in terms of my development - an insight came from that book.
I did a book signing when we were in New York the day before yesterday. A lady came through and she was just weeping, and said, 'I wish this would have been brought out sooner, my sister is in prison for suffocating her child.'
I always love writing the third book in a series because you get to tie up all the threads that you put out in the first two books. You finally let people know what really happens and reveal all the secrets and bring certain characters together.
Everybody writes a book too many.
