The ecological impact of book manufacture and traditional book marketing - I think that should really be considered. We have this industry in which we cut down trees to make the paper that we then use enormous amounts of electricity to turn into books that weigh a great deal and are then shipped enormous distances to point-of-sale retail.
My ancestors fought for the Confederacy during the Civil War; I was raised in Natchez, Miss.; I performed in the Confederate Pageant for a decade; I dug ditches and loaded trucks with black men who taught me more than any book ever could; and I graduated from Ole Miss. Anyone who survived that is a de facto expert on the South.
A book tour is not a good opportunity to let your mind wander. You have to pay attention, remember salespeople's and interviewers' names, succinctly summarize your book in a 'selling' way, and so on.
Because I write a book a year, I always want to do one other project every year that's stimulating in a different way. It means you can be working but not using up your prose juice, you know?
The book is actually called 'A Mentor Leader, a Different Way to Lead.' It really talks about my experience in the way I tried lead our football team, things that I learned from, basically, the coaches that I played for and my parents about leadership. And it is a little bit different, counter to maybe what society says about great leaders.
There is no rule book, no right or wrong; you just have to make it up and do the very best you can to care for your family.
I got a call on a Sunday. 'Do you want to do 'The Godfather?' I thought they were kidding me, right? I said, 'Yes, of course, I love that book' - which I had never read.
The more I want a book to be done, the faster I type because I just want to get it out.
I left my job as a feature writer on a newspaper to write a book, then sent it off to a number of agents thinking they would all reject me. Within a week, most had come back to say they loved what they had read, which then led to a bidding war for my first two novels.
What we know is smartphones are everywhere and they are rich in data. What we know is that there are apps once downloaded by the consumer that will also in turn download the consumers' contact book. Most consumers don't want that to happen and don't know it's happening.
A reader can never tell if it's a real thimble or an imaginary thimble, because by the time you're reading it, they're the same. It's a thimble. It's in the book.
I'm the only talk show host, I think, if there's such a category in, what's called, the book of records, to have a guest die while we were taping the show, yeah.
'Blind Curve,' the book I'm working on now, sprang from a crazy incident that happened to me last year while on my book tour. I was pulled out of my car for a minor traffic violation - an incident that escalated into my being thrown into cuffs and told I was going to jail. Except in my story, the hero doesn't get off as easily as I did.
A reader's own imagination is a far more powerful form of CGI than anything any movie can provide because it's unique. In your own imagination, you can enter all sorts of worlds, and they are unique to you because no other reader will interpret a book the same way.
Asking anyone what she or he is reading is a necessary part of conversation, exchanging news. So I take recommendations from friends - and I always pass along a book I've loved.
Whenever I have a few hours to dive into a book, I am happy.
Up until my first book was published, I had all this potential, people would say, and I screwed up. After it, I could say: 'No, I didn't screw up.'
I don't pick up my work at all. If it's something that's still in progress and I have the chance to make some edits on the material or think about the order, little things like that, I'll keep those stories at hand and go through them. But once it exists as the book, it's locked away in a vault, and I kind of put it behind me.
There were many times in my initial days as a writer when I had felt the need to talk to someone, to leverage on someone's experience, to learn from someone who had written and published a book.
I have to say, creating memories is so important to me that I did a book about creating memories for your family.
Every year, the Giller jury is different. You write the best book you can and throw it out there.
When I begin a book, I inevitably discover many things along the way, about the characters, their past histories and the political intrigues that surround them. This discovery process is vital, and I would not prejudice it by deciding too much in advance.
You have your brains, but it's energy and desire that make you write a book.
I love to eat, I love to feed people, and I'm a great cook. I joked with my friends that I wanted to write a book where desserts had to be extensively researched, since I have a terrible sweet tooth. My particular downfall is cake.
I'm quite nosy. Somebody will be reading a book on a train, and I'll go: 'How is it? Is it any good?' and they'll be like, 'Yeah, now let me read it.'
Summertime in Montana, I become a monosyllabic baboon. I want to ride with the cowboys, go to brandings, doctor cattle, and train my horses. But in a few months, the snow starts to fly. The days become shorter; the yellow color of interior light becomes delicious. I look at my shelves, and every book just glows, and I want to be inside of that.
I struggle with reading a bit. I'm slightly dyslexic, so reading takes me quite a while, and in general, I'm not a big book reader at all. And something like 'Game of Thrones' seems very daunting to me!
Fundamentalism - of any variety - is a form of illiteracy, in that it asserts that it is necessary to read only one book.
The first book I sat down to write was an historical romance. It was really bad and thankfully no one ever saw it.
For commercial books in a genre, readers' and editors' expectations may be fairly rigid. Some romance lines, for instance, issue fairly detailed writers' guidelines explaining exactly what must happen in a book they publish (and what must not).
I feel lucky because I was a nerd, which I talk about in the book, but I had academic success, so through that, because that's what my parents put a great deal of value on, I had a great childhood because I sort of fulfilled the expectations of being good at school.
A book has got smell. A new book smells great. An old book smells even better. An old book smells like ancient Egypt.
I don't think there is such a thing as a bad book for children.
It's so tedious writing cookbooks or writing the recipes because I've never been much of a measurer. But to write a book, you have to measure everything.
Even tiny children looking at a picture book are using their imaginations, gleaning clues from the images to understand what is happening, and perhaps using the throwaway details which the illustrator includes to add their own elements to the story.
I am more excited about 'Divinity of Doubt: The God Question' than any other book in my entire career, and I've had seven New York Times bestsellers, three of them reaching number one.
