My father is a well known artist, Ted Dyer, who has been painting for many years. Our work is very different, but growing up surrounded by paintings, paints, easels and art books does have an effect.
And I don't like books which are full of name dropping.
I don't read books on how to write screenplays just because I'm stubborn. So it's all sort of made up.
I'm a big 'Star Wars' fan and grew up watching the movies. I read all the books and have read 'Star Wars' fiction that went between the newest trilogy and the original trilogy and it was part of my childhood.
As far as I knew white women were never lonely, except in books. White men adored them, Black men desired them and Black women worked for them.
I think it's a fallacy to say that a good book sells itself. It doesn't happen. I'm a voracious reader and I can give you a long list of books which should have been best sellers but they aren't. How can you buy a book if you haven't heard of it?
At first blush, it seems odd that loser lit books are rejected initially, then go on to be fiercely loved by legions of readers. This apparent contradiction might be due to the fact that if they didn't screw up their lives, most losers would be the kind of power-elite, Type A go-getters whom readers love to hate.
I've been drawing authors and politicians for newspapers for many years. I try to read up on the person; in the case of authors, read one of their books. I watch interviews via YouTube and collect pictures via the Internet.
I read over a hundred books a year and have done so since I was fifteen years old, and every book I've read has taught me something.
My parents took an interest in nothing, at home no books, no records. My mother and my father are the emblem of indifference, dryness and bad taste. My father is also terribly stingy, in life as well as in feelings: I have never seen him filling up the bathtub.
I have a brother and sister; my mother does not care for thought, and father, too busy with his briefs to notice what we do. He buys me many books, but begs me not to read them, because he fears they joggle the mind.
It takes me a long time writing books. It takes me about five years to write a book, and when I'm done, the last thing I want to do is to do it again.
Of the female black authors, I really like Morrison's early books a lot. But she's really become so much a clone of Faulkner. He did it better.
Aeroplanes interested me, and at the outbreak of the Second World War, I joined the RAF as a volunteer reservist. I took the opportunity of studying the books which the RAF made available for radio mechanics and looked forward to an interesting course in radio.
The initial research will be very indiscriminate. I do a lot of reading, buy a stack of books and read and digest them, and then I start doing phone interviews and archival research and then the travelling.
They want a lip print for their autograph books. I'm a sport; I go along.
One similarity I see between peers and some of the people who read my books is that comics were definitely an outlet for us.
I think part of the problem sometimes is that there's so much happening in my books, to whittle it down into a single script is hard.
Most books are surplus to the world's requirements, and I am going to sound very conceited here, but I am trying to write books that aren't just using up trees.
People in my books tend to get their just deserts, even if not at the hands of the police.
My overall artistic goal is to marry graphic design with comic books and traditional storytelling.
I don't like to read books where I feel as though I've stepped into the middle of things and don't know what's going on. I like to see characters I've met before, but I don't want to feel left out because I haven't read other books in the series.
When I started earning money from screen-writing, for a long time my only indulgences were books.
I don't have a boss. Well, I have a boss: the public. If the public doesn't buy my books, I would be out of a job.
As I got older, I really got into Tupac's poetry, his books and just learning about his life and what he was into.
There's not a day that I don't work on vocals, have vocal coaches, go to acting classes, read books.
Books that distribute things... with as daring a freedom as we use in dreams, put us on our feet again.
I want books to give me insight into the way people's brains work and hearts work, and that's what engages me.
I just write the books that I think I would want to read.
When you're writing two books a year, you really need some time off and don't want to use that down time for touring. I do like talking with readers, though; they can tell you important stuff.
I'd always wanted to write books ever since I was a kid.
There are reasons people seek escape in books, and one of those reasons is that the boundary of what can happen is beyond what we do - or would want to see in real life.
To buy books would be a good thing if we also could buy the time to read them.
Who has fully realized that history is not contained in thick books but lives in our very blood?
I've had aunts and uncles who not only haven't read my books but could hardly believe that I was a writer.
Books should to one of these fours ends conduce, for wisdom, piety, delight, or use.
