The telephone book is full of facts, but it doesn't contain a single idea.
I make extensive outlines before I write a book. I usually know what will happen. I know the characters, and I know what they are about.
Sometimes some of these little side excursions are useful and I manage to fit them in the book somewhere.
When I'm writing fiction I'm thinking, God, this is so hard - I have to make all this stuff up! I wish I were writing a nonfiction book where all the facts are laid out and I don't have to be so much at sea.
I consider anybody a twerp who hasn't read 'Democracy in America' by Alexis de Tocqueville. There can never be a better book than that one on the strengths and vulnerabilities inherent in our form of government.
I think everyone is introduced to the Peter Pan story when they're very young. Everyone has read the book and watched the Disney film and all that.
Alternative cartoonists have to rely on comic book stores to get their stuff in the hands of readers.
I think when people hear about a celebrity writing a book of any kind, the assumption is that it was dictated to a ghostwriter.
An intelligence officer and historian, Rayburn published a 2014 book, 'Iraq After America,' which is a must-read for anyone who wants to understand how Iraq descended into chaos in the years after the American troop withdrawal at the end of 2011.
A novel is like a gland pill - it nips off the cream of my hysterics and gets them running on track in a book where they belong instead of rioting all over my person.
If you can get every kid to have found a book that he or she loves, then you've done a great job.
A book reads the better which is our own, and has been so long known to us, that we know the topography of its blots, and dog's ears, and can trace the dirt in it to having read it at tea with buttered muffins.
I want to offer a word of encouragement to authors: You have to feel called to the message of your book enough that you want people to get that message. When you get to that place, your passion goes through the roof, and then the other stuff happens.
I just love the idea that people disappear into the story for a while. You grab a book, and you want to get back to it, and your life becomes a bit of an interruption. I would love readers to feel like that.
Perhaps if I knew I would be stranded on an island with but one book, I would choose the Bible. For no religious reason whatsoever, but because of the varieties of stories, which might be useful as the days pass.
I never take any notes or draw charts or make elaborate diagrams, but I hold an image of the shape of a book in my head and work from that mental hologram.
When I present the Charlie Parker book, I do a call and response that works quite well. With the Thelonious Monk book, I play the music and work with kids in a group to create a color wheel and show how the wheel can be mapped on a 12-tone chromatic scale.
The first thing I did when I sold my book was buy a new wedding ring for my wife and asked her to marry me all over again.
What's my favourite book? It changes all the time.
I always thought that as much as I love 'White Jazz,' it became almost unfilmable at some point, because there are so many strands, so much, and it became so psychotic... that's what made it such a great book, but those things would not carry over into the filmic realm, I thought, with ease.
You learn more about life from watching 'Big Brother' than from reading a book.
Every book you pick up has its own lesson or lessons, and quite often the bad books have more to teach than the good ones.
I'm publicizing the book that's done. I'm writing the book that's in the hopper, and I'm doing a little advance research on the book to come.
Velcro: what a rip-off.
I knew the term Stepford Wife, and I knew what that meant. I never read the book, and I think before I started filming I watched the movie. I thought it was very dated.
I wake up a little before six, and I go right to my study. That's where I do my daily reading of the Oswald Chambers book, 'My Utmost for His Highest.'
I've always wanted to have a book published - it was a dream of mine, but the thought of actually writing a book made me feel really sick.
If no one knows your book is out there, no one will think about buying it. It's as simple as that.
I try not to think too much about an audience when I'm writing the first draft of a book - at that stage, the prospect of anyone reading what I've written would be enough to scare me into setting my laptop on fire.
I think I'm a born storyteller. Inspiration is all around me. I can read a newspaper article and come up with an idea for a book.
I've never read a book or attended a class on screenwriting. I'm not opposed to the idea, but I like what I've got going on naturally and want to protect that. The one question I will ask myself as I'm re-reading a script for the 60th time is, 'Am I entertained? Still?' If the answer is 'yes,' I'll assume other people will be, too.
When I left college I thought - based on a staggeringly inadequate understanding of how the world worked - that I might like to go into book publishing.
My books come to me in images, and sometimes the image is at the beginning of the book, and sometimes it's simply a flash somewhere in the middle.
The anti-apartheid prisoners on the island, like so many in every age and nation, found that Shakespeare had a peculiar ability to gentle their condition. They used to gather clandestinely to read the plays; on one occasion, the book was passed around for each man to mark his favourite lines.
How long it takes to write a book depends on its length.
For me, hip-hop was a mirror when young-adult books were not. I could see myself in a Nas song more than I could see myself in a book.
