When I was about 12 or 13, my father gave me 'The Little Prince.' He was making sure that I knew it was a special book. I'd seen the name of Antoine de Saint-Exupery, but to me it seemed a very French name, and I was not excited about him as a person.
I wrote my first book at eight, all of four pages. At 10, I did a 40-page story. At 12, I wrote two stage plays.
When you say 'comic book' in America, people think of Mickey Mouse, and Archie. It has a connotation of juvenile.
When I was 11 years old, I thought, 'All I really wanna be able to do is my own comic book,' and I'm doing it. I don't have any other real ambitions. I have nothing to conquer at all.
Books give us insight into other people, other cultures. They make us laugh. They make us think. If they are really good, they make us believe that we are better for having read them. You don't read a book - you experience it. Every story opens up a new world.
'Until Friday Night' is the first book in my new young adult series, 'The Field Party.'
Whenever I want to laugh, I read a wonderful book, 'Children's Letters to God.' You can open it anywhere. One I read recently said, 'Dear God, thank you for the baby brother, but what I prayed for was a puppy.'
Well, I was a big fan of the book and therein a huge fan of the girl Precious. And so I felt like I knew this girl. I felt like I'd grown up alongside her. I felt like she was in my family. She was my friend and she was like people I didn't want to be friends with.
I just thought it made sense to call a book 'Not Garbage,' even though the majority of it was going to be the scraps from people's studios; like newspaper clippings, weird drawings and stuff they might not necessarily show as artists.
I never read detective novels. I started out in graduate school writing a more serious book. Right around that time I read 'The Day of the Jackal' and 'The Exorcist'. I hadn't read a lot of commercial fiction, and I liked them.
The Holy Book calls upon Muslims to resist tyranny. Dictatorships in Pakistan, however long, have, therefore, always collapsed in the face of this spirit.
You are not dead until you are in that grave, so don't close the book. Don't give up.
I actually wasn't much of a book reader at all before the 'Twilight' series. They just draw you in, and people love them. They're terrific books.
This book here, 'The Prosecution of George W. Bush for Murder,' in it, I put together a case against George Bush that could result - it absolutely could result in his being prosecuted for first-degree murder in an American courtroom.
You have to understand that while I pre-plot the meta story of a given book, I often have no idea of what will happen on the next page, let alone the next chapter. That's what makes it fun for me; I write the books the same way many people read them.
I wish I didn't have ever to sign my long name on the cover of a book, and I wish I could write a story that would seem absolutely true to the child who hears it and to myself.
The next time you download a book on Kindle, buy a Michael Moore screed at Barnes & Noble, or order up a political movie from video on demand, remember that it is the Supreme Court's decision in 'Citizens United' that guarantees you the right to do so.
The average actor might only be able to book six to eight guest star jobs a year - that would be high. So when you start doing the math, you can't live on that in Los Angeles.
Let's think about where things stood in December 2015. By that time, Republicans had already had such epic and long-standing struggles with young people that I'd written a whole book about it. Additionally, Republicans had already had a bruising start to their primary season.
The funny thing, I guess, is that my husband ended up being the muse of a book about the worst marriage in the world, because if he hadn't consistently said, 'Don't censor yourself, don't worry about me' - if he'd been anxious and worried about it - then it would never have gotten written.
To be completely honest, I didn't know 'Twilight' was a book.
I've been asked this question so many times, do you feel you need to write a book for adults? No, I don't need to write a book for adults.
I consider myself lucky that Sonu Nigam, Bikram Ghosh and Taufiq Quereshi came forward to create an original soundtrack to promote my book, something that hasn't been tried here before!
I like to get suggestions on what to read. I'll look at Twitter, people I like, people I admire... I'll go and research the book, download it on my phone and read it while I'm on the road.
I want to write so well that a person is 30 or 40 pages in a book of mine... before she realizes she's reading.
I'm a comic book fan.
When you read a great book, you don't escape from life, you plunge deeper into it.
The first comic book I ever read was an issue of 'Legion of Super-Heroes' where the earth was surrounded by all of these chains. I remember the cover; I got it at a birthday party.
I'd have all these crazy sort of 'who would win battles' with my friends who were big fans of other comic book characters, and I'd always find a way for Batman to win. It was deep for me, man.
I never expected to earn money out of writing. In fact, the idea of getting published was too bourgeois. Then, in England, I realised that writing a book was something you could do without it being laughable.
Sequels are very rarely a good idea, and in any case, the success of the book changed my relationship with the club in some ways.
I like to match what I wear to my book jacket - it's a little bit cheesy, but it's my thing.
I went to public school my whole life, graduated high school with my class. Growing up, I'd go to an audition, my friends would go to soccer practice and we'd all reconvene and hang out in our neighborhood. When I would book something, I would never tell my friends. Acting was just fun. I was a kid, I wasn't jaded.
As a writer, you live in such isolation. It's hard to imagine your book has a life beyond you.
Every single book is a challenge.
In the early '90s, I was disillusioned after the blasts and riots in Mumbai. I was in college and started thinking that religion was the root cause of all these evils. While my father told me not to blame religion because of a few bad people, I wasn't convinced. The faith was restored after I started writing my first book.
