But then of course you reach a point where you have to say, I've got to figure out how this book's going to end. Otherwise, you're going to write yourself into so many dead-ends.
I like vocabulary and I actually read a book called 'Word Freak,' which is about a guy who basically went into competitive Scrabble for a year. But having a big vocabulary and being good at Scrabble are not the same thing.
Electronic distribution is more of a fall-back strategy for putting out a book that isn't deemed profitable enough to print. You hardly make any money publishing an electronic book.
While I had no intention of ending the series after 'The Spellmans Strike Again,' I did close many doors in that book and, with the fifth one, I was opening a lot of doors and not finding anything behind them and then opening another door and another until I found something. It was a while before I found my stride.
'Catcher in the Rye.' I feel like any brooding teen loves that book.
You do not chop off a section of your imaginative substance and make a book specifically for children, for - if you are honest - you have no idea where childhood ends and maturity begins. It is all endless and all one.
The reason a writer writes a book is to forget a book and the reason a reader reads one is to remember it.
I had not expected 'A Brief History of Time' to be a best seller. It was my first popular book and aroused a great deal of interest. Initially, many people found it difficult to understand. I therefore decided to try to write a new version that would be easier to follow.
There's this long tradition of... even 'Where The Wild Things Are,' which many people consider the best kids' picture book of all time. It was considered revolutionary, and some libraries wouldn't carry it. But it's a classic because it taps into empowerment for kids, kids facing dangers and winning.
Everyone has bad days, and when you're having a bad day, you think, 'Here I am being singled out by a hostile, malicious universe that is picking exclusively on me.' And then you read a book about bad days and realize they happen to everyone, not just tormented, persecuted you.
The issue of doing an adaptation of a book is the theater of the mind, and so you always face that.
A man in a bookstore buys a book on loneliness and every woman in the store hits on him. A woman buys a book on loneliness and the store clears out.
I'd love to see a good script of one of my books, in these years of animations and comic book sequels, and had so many written over the years, but none quite clicked.
I think there's a reason that horror appeals to teens. There's a lot of useful lessons to take away from reading horror. We get to be scared in the comfort and safety of our own homes. We can put the book down if we get too scared, and no one will ever know if we decide not to pick it up again.
With 'Machine of Death,' we became the #1 bestselling book on Amazon in a single day.
As we all saw in grade school, once you learn how to read a book, somebody is going to want to write one - that's how authors are made. Once we know how to read our own genetic code, someone is going to want to rewrite that 'text,' tinker with traits - play God, some would say.
There's my education in computers, right there; this is the whole thing, everything I took out of a book.
I always wanted to write a book. Not a romance novel. Maybe a crime thriller. Something with action. Maybe that will happen some day.
When I make a book, I make it for the child and not for the parent - no jokes in it for the parents!
No one over thirty-five is worth meeting who has not something to teach us, - something more than we could learn for ourselves, from a book.
I think that's one of the most important things that books do: not to teach you anything, but to help you teach yourself by just being in the world of the book and having your own thoughts and reactions and noticing your own reactions and thoughts and learning about yourself that way.
The decision for me was whether to have 'The Father' be a book that told a story - from the point of view of this speaker, the daughter - without, as in the earlier books, then having a section on something else and a section on something else.
Every book is a quotation; and every house is a quotation out of all forests, and mines, and stone quarries; and every man is a quotation from all his ancestors.
I read The Bell Jar, and then I read her memoir and her diaries, and a third book, an outside opinion. Just the way she made the pillows so neat on the oven door. It just seems to be the opposite of, if you're going to take your life, in a horrible rage it happens.
Writers tell stories better, because they've had more practice, but everyone has a book in them. Yes, that old cliche.
We went to Ibiza, and I was on Ritalin, and, for a kid who couldn't concentrate, I read a 200-page book on King Arthur, and my mum just hated it. She said it just wasn't me.
When a French book becomes an international hit it is because of the author and not because of the language. The same goes for movies.
A movie is a movie and a book is a book, and they have different rules.
I have a stack of those plastic card hotel room keys that I picked up on this latest book tour. It's about a yard tall. Ah yes, a stack of lonely nights.
And I say in the book, 'Hard Measures,' that actually they were pretty wimpy if you really - if the American people actually knew what these techniques where, they would say, what are you talking about?
I cite in my book countless examples of the foundational documents of the colonial period in America and the writings of the leaders, that this was intended to be a Christian nation.
The best way to learn to write is to read in the genre you might be interested in; then, you need to actually sit down and write. In a lot of cases, the first book you write will not get published. Do not get hung up on that. Start a second book.
The simplest science book is over my head.
When someone says to me, 'I love your book - I read it in a day,' I want to tell them to go back and read it again.
I wrote a book called The Taste of New Wine because I couldn't find a book that talked about the reality of the situation and how we were dishonest and afraid.
I've always wanted to write an airport book.
