I guess when you take a look at the book 'Atlas Shrugged,' I think most people always like to identify with the main character - that would be John Galt. I guess I identify with Hank Rearden, the fella that just refused until the very end to give up.
While I was writing 'Stick Out Your Tongue' in Beijing, the police began knocking on my door again. As soon as I finished the book, I moved to Hong Kong so that I could work undisturbed on my next novel.
With a book I am the writer and I am also the director and I'm all of the actors and I'm the special effects guy and the lighting technician: I'm all of that. So if it's good or bad, it's all up to me.
We've all got a black book of missed opportunities.
'Out of Africa,' Dinesen's second book, is a love story, though not the one portrayed by Streep and Redford in the film. The memoir is about Dinesen's love of East Africa - the cultures, the landscapes, the animals. The feeling that saturates the book is reverence.
Lewis Robinson's first novel, 'Water Dogs,' is stuffed with snow. Open practically any page of this book, and crystals will shake out.
I sit down and draw from my lyric book. I sit down and start looking through it and see if there is anything that strikes me that I've written.
I read a lot of obscure books and it is nice to open a book.
A classic is a book that doesn't have to be written again.
In 1965, I was teaching a seminar on freedom when I told my students that the ultimate freedom lay in casting a dice to decide what to do. They were so shocked and fascinated that I knew I had to write the book.
A blurb might bring a reader to a book, but then the book itself has to do the rest of the work.
It wasn't conscious, but I guess that one book is the reaction to the other. The first is so imprisoned in a male point-of-view, and the second is a point-of-view that can go anywhere it wants.
It's never easy to adapt a book, especially as the author, because it's as if you're chopping off appendages. It really feels painful to decide what has to go.
I think my printing to this day looks like the printing right out of a comic book. Actually, I always wanted to be in a comic book. I watched cartoons when I was a kid, too, and both comics and cartoons lit fire in my imagination. This realm holds a lot of interest for me, a lot of passion for me. So to be comic-ized, yeah, that's cool.
Sometimes when I think how good my book can be, I can hardly breathe.
My dream was to be known as a writer and to be able to produce at least one book that would be read by people. That dream came true with the publication of my first novel - and all the rest has been a sweet bonus.
I have like 250 letters that I have to whittle it down to 150. Only then do you have the whole overview of a book. When it was finally edited, at least my take was, everybody's lying. You know?
What I've found over the years working on various projects is, you can have a clever book or clever tagline, but there has to be a story to go along with it that leads to something bigger. Something with a little more texture to it.
For me, it's writing a book and telling people about this story.
Book tours and research provide a lot of travel - too much, I sometimes think, but we do take vacations.
What I thought we ought to try to do in a book like this is to focus closely on Lincoln, himself, to see what he knew, how he knew it, how he came to make the decisions that he did, and how he implemented them.
To map the Governor General's Award is to map both the past and the future of Canadian literature, and to be nominated for my first book is wonderful.
There are perhaps no days of our childhood we lived so fully as those we spent with a favorite book.
I have three brothers and they're all into computers. They're all intellects. My mother would pay me a quarter a page to read a book and I couldn't make 50 cents. I just couldn't do it.
For a long time, I'd wanted to write a book that I would be proud and happy and psychologically and morally comfortable about my parents' reading.
A bad book is the worse that it cannot repent. It has not been the devil's policy to keep the masses of mankind in ignorance; but finding that they will read, he is doing all in his power to poison their books.
I believe if you write a great book, the chances are it'll get a great reception.
I think the bravest thing to write about is nothing, just to write a book in which nothing happens.
One thing I have noticed is that when you're a younger editor, you're more intense about it. As you go along, you relax a little. More and more, I feel that the book is the author's. You give the author your thoughts, and it's up to him or her to decide what to do.
I forget a book as soon as I finish writing it, which is not always a good thing.
I was a war correspondent in Korea. I did a book on it: 'This is War.'
And when I'm writing, I write a lot anyway. I might write pages and pages of conversation between characters that don't necessarily end up in the book, or in the story I'm working on, because they're simply my way of getting to know the characters.
A stage play requires very different craft from a book, fiction or otherwise, and ditto from a screenplay.
The book that first made me want to be a writer is Flannery O'Connor's short story collection 'A Good Man Is Hard To Find.'
When I wrote my first book, 'The Tennis Party', my overriding concern was that I didn't write the autobiographical first novel. I was so, so determined not to write about a 24-year-old journalist. It was going to have male characters, and middle-aged people, so I could say, 'Look, I'm not just writing about my life, I'm a real author.'
I just finished a novel called 'Exult,' by Joe Quirk, last night. It's about hang gliding. I liked his first book, too, 'The Ultimate Rush.' I now know that I never, ever, ever want to go hang gliding, so that's good.
