For books I want to keep reading, it's definitely the voice. It must be a voice I've never heard before, and it must have its own particular intelligence. By 'voice,' I don't mean vernacular. It has to have its own particular history and world that it inhabits.
It's crazy enough to be the person crawling through the bushes in Northern Ireland with a telescopic lens taking pictures - there are crazy people out there. But the idea that people want to go to sites and find out those spoilers... it's like if there was a website called Last Pages of Great Books, would you read that?
I make money using my brains and lose money listening to my heart. But in the long run my books balance pretty well.
The whole story of the comfort women, the system of forced sexual slavery, the medical experiments of Unit 731, is not something that is in the US psyche. That is changing because many books are coming out.
I hate books; they only teach us to talk about things we know nothing about.
The shelves of many evangelicals are full of books that point out the flaws in evolution, discuss it only as a theory, and almost imply that there's a conspiracy here to avoid the fact that evolution is actually flawed. All of those books, unfortunately, are based upon conclusions that no reasonable biologist would now accept.
My parents both work in publishing, and I was a bright, academic kind of kid, and I read a lot of books, and when you read a lot, I guess the muscle that gets exercised is where you can hear the voices in your head. You can turn words into pictures and into sounds and into colours and smells.
The good thing about songwriting is you don't have to delineate between what's true and what's fiction; records aren't put on the shelf that way. Books are, movies are, but records aren't.
I'm totally into new age and self-help books. I used to work in a bookstore and that's the section they gave me, and I got way into it. I just loved the power of positive thinking, letting yourself go.
Films are always different from books.
The power of a book lies in its power to turn a solitary act into a shared vision. As long as we have books, we are not alone.
I read Tolkien when I was 11. I read 'The Hobbit' and the trilogy on a road trip with my family. I identified with the nonhumans in those books, and it never occurred to me why that was.
All my books started out as extravagant and ended up pure and plain.
Who ever converses among old books will be hard to please among the new.
You can do so much crazy stuff with books that isn't necessarily being done. That's how culture stays alive - by doing new things with it.
Humans are very complex; I definitely have a new respect for authors that are able to write books nonstop. It's an incredible talent.
I'm a contemporary artist and I show in art galleries and museums. I show a number of photographs and films, but I also make television programs, books and some appetizing, all with the same concept.
Let me tell you, writing comics is as hard as anything I've ever done - for me, at least. I'm now officially in awe of guys who can crank out multiple books a month and maintain a high level of quality. Comics are completely different than any other medium I've dabbled in.
The Sistine Chapel is an extraordinary work of education - it lays out all the early books of the Bible.
Reading was a big thing, yes. Books were a big thing. But the things that stick out were the newspapers.
Robin McKinley's 'The Blue Sword' was a defining book of my teen years, and I'd love to have more books like that in the world.
Say I lived until 80 and read a book a month seriously, that means I was looking at 480 books left in my life. If I had only 480 left, I wanted to stop sifting through material I didn't have confidence in and turn my attention to those that I know merited my reading.
The last three books are much more a case of a moment of history, what happened almost by accident or coincidence, like being in the same elevator or lifeboat.
Children will not pretend to be enjoying books, and they will not read books because they have been told that these books are good. They are looking for delight.
I always love writing the third book in a series because you get to tie up all the threads that you put out in the first two books. You finally let people know what really happens and reveal all the secrets and bring certain characters together.
Every child is going to grow up. You can see it happen in the books: They get older and older and belong to themselves to a greater and greater extent.
It wasn't cool that I didn't comb my hair and had books and wore glasses. It was never cool be a nerd and tomboy, and these days, it really is. And I'm like, 'You guys have no idea what I went through.' How many times my mother yelled at me to comb my hair.
I absolutely adore writing books with paranormal elements - and I love creating the often-complex worlds and/or plots that go along with those stories - but at the heart of all of that ,you have the characters, and when you get down to the core of it, it's spending the time with the characters that is what I truly love.
I use Amazon for books. I use Amazon for loads of other things. I regard Amazon as a source, as I think a lot of other people do.
I used to get a haircut every Saturday so I would never miss any of the comic books. I had practically no hair when I was a kid!
I had written two or three books before my husband noticed that in every one of them a family member was missing. He suggested that it was because my father's death, when I was five, utterly changed my world. I can only suppose he is right and that this is the reason I am drawn to a narrative where someone's life is changed by loss.
It is a good idea to know which publishers publish which stories. For example, there is no sense in sending a picture book text to a publisher who does not publish picture books.
One, I have a wonderful publisher, Black Sparrow Press; as long as they exist, they will keep me in print. And they claim they sell very respectable numbers of my books, so I guess, and it's true, every place I go, my books are in libraries and on bookshelves.
Books are good enough in their own way, but they are a poor substitute for life.
One sheds one's sicknesses in books - repeats and presents again one's emotions, to be master of them.
You get to relive your childhood when you have a baby and you see these toys and these books you read when you were little - the innocence that you are able to maintain because you have to find that again in order to connect with your child keeps you in a special state of mind.
