What kids are exposed to on television is more frightening and horrifying than what they see in my books.
The bastard form of mass culture is humiliated repetition... always new books, new programs, new films, news items, but always the same meaning.
I love old books. They tell you stories about their use. You can see where the fingerprints touched the pages as they held the book open. You can see how long they lingered on each page by the finger stains.
Writing books that people want to read is helpful - my most successful book is my only police procedural, a very popular subgenre of the very popular crime fiction genre.
But you can try to read books at the wrong time or for the wrong reasons.
I'm usually reading too many books - in fact, I'm usually reading enough books that if the stack fell on me, I'd be injured.
Right now I'm singing along to books on tape. I typically pop in something like Stephen King's 'The Stand,' and I love singing along to that kind of stuff.
Getting close to books, and spending time by myself, I was obliged to think about things I would never have thought about if I was busy romping around with a brother and sister.
I was at Harvard with a whole bunch of poets, and that was very rare. They published a lot of books because there was an excitement after the war that translated into poetry.
I don't plan the books ahead of time. It's not like Harry Potter. I don't work in a straight line. I don't write with an outline.
'Dandelion Wine' became one of the few books that I returned to time and again, and while not anywhere near the story crafter as Mr. Bradbury, I hope I managed to absorb by osmosis some of his techniques.
My father was a tyrant about reading, and that put me off books when I was little.
I am just doing photo shoots. It's not something that extraordinary. I'm not a great artist, I'm not writing books, I'm not a painter, and people in the streets ask me for a picture or a note, and I say, 'Why?'
Each age, it is found, must write its own books; or rather, each generation for the next succeeding.
More books, more racing and more foolishness with cars and motorcycles are in the works.
I love it when my books cause controversy, when people argue violently about the ending.
There's probably one more story about Bosnia that I'd like to do, because I spent a fair amount of time on the Serb side of the lines, which isn't apparent in the other books.
I do everything from home. I broadcast commentaries for CBS News Radio every day - from home, on a disk that I mail in. I write a weekly op-ed piece for the 'New York Daily News,' and any books or plays or movies that I'm crazy enough to write, I do that from home.
There are several books out on punk history, but I haven't read any of them. I was there.
A recluse without books and ink is already in life a dead man.
And I think of that again as I've written in several of my beauty books, a lot of health comes from the proper eating habits, which are something that - you know, I come from a generation that wasn't - didn't have a lot of food.
Nicola Barker is both prodigiously talented and admirably fearless. I have loved her books. But for some time, I had little or no idea what the point of the story of Sri Ramakrishna was. In fact, he was one of the outstanding men of 19th-century India.
I'm not a natural reader but there are books I'll read and read again.
I regret all of my books.
Free and fair access to books - to reading - is a right and one we should fight for.
I think the people who would be the least interested in my work would be people who read lots of comic books.
As a child, I read a great many books in which animals and birds played significant roles, not only in the narrative itself, but also in creating the emotional and psychological atmosphere of that narrative - the imaginative furniture, as it were, in which any story unfolds.
I tried to get into comics initially after I graduated Clemson in 1994. I spent a year trying to get in, and I quit reading books because not getting in made me sad.
I'm not intelligent. I'm not arrogant. I'm just like the people who read my books. I used to have a jazz club, and I made the cocktails and I made the sandwiches. I didn't want to become a writer - it just happened.
Books are the blessed chloroform of the mind.
The earliest books in the New Testament to be written were the Epistles, not the Gospels. It's almost as though Saint Paul and others who wrote the Epistles weren't that interested in whether Jesus was real.
So, I am independently well-off and don't have to do anything, but I still do. I write books, lecture around the world, work with scientists and governments.
What's encouraging is that the early new platforms - Kindle and iPad - are clearly leading to people buying more books. The data is in on that.
I spend my happiest hours in reading Vedantic books. They are to me like the light of the morning, like the pure air of the mountains - so simple, so true, if once understood.
In my books and in romance as a genre, there is a positive, uplifting feeling that leaves the reader with a sense of encouragement and hope for a brighter future - or a brighter present.
What gives my books authenticity is that I actually do what it is I'm writing about. I think the fact that I am in the autopsy room, I go to the crime scene and I do work in the lab gives my books this flavor that otherwise they wouldn't have.
