I was basically a dork that hit the books and liked to build things and did all of the things that you weren't supposed to do to be popular. But somehow I ended up onstage, playing guitar in front of everybody else.
Most researchers sit at a table and read books. My research, since three years old, has been to use my own body.
I was alone as a child. I lived in fairytales, adventures, Shakespeare. They are the friends, my books.
It had been startling and disappointing to me to find out that story books had been written by people, that books were not natural wonders, coming of themselves like grass.
The Bible is worth all the other books which have ever been printed.
I've written enough books with real celebrities, such as Walter Payton and Hank Aaron and Billy Graham, to know that fame looks good only to people who don't have it.
If you want to read about love and marriage, you've got to buy two separate books.
To me, it was a sad fate to have been born into a period and a world where everything was in tip-top order, and the only real excitement was to be found in history books and occasionally also in the paper.
Books are better than movies because you design the set the way you want it to look.
I have never been depressed or thrown a plate, which I attribute to the cathartic effects of writing books about people whose lives are more grueling than mine.
I have to live my books before I write them.
Having big audiences when you're on a book tour is like Valhalla if you're a person who used to sell Girl Scout cookies on the side. Because you want to give the reading that will sell the most books.
Books say: she did this because. Life says: she did this. Books are where things are explained to you, life where things aren't.
All the books I have written have been one book, from the beginning.
I've written 16 children's books and five unpublished novels. Some of the latter were breathtakingly bad.
One thing you can't intend is how you will be read. I hear it said a lot that my books are about the 'search for identity', and this is said admiringly, as if I meant to encourage such a search.
I'm a voracious reader. I want information, all kinds - Internet, books, magazines.
Be careful about reading health books. You may die of a misprint.
Earth and sky, woods and fields, lakes and rivers, the mountain and the sea, are excellent schoolmasters, and teach some of us more than we can ever learn from books.
I have a tendency to face my bad fantasies in my books.
The comforts come from my movie and television writing. It is unusual to live this well simply from books.
I have no personal experience in the military. All I know about it is what I've seen in movies and read in books and watched on television. My knowledge is probably no more or no less than the average person's. 'A Brief Encounter with the Enemy' was created by taking bits and pieces from here and there, and then putting my own spin on them.
But at the same time, I have trouble keeping things out of books, which is why I don't write short stories because they turn into novels.
I honestly thought I probably did sell 100 million books. That doesn't seem out of the ordinary to me.
The way I create music is maybe like a painting, to compose in a more visual way. Basically it's the music that I want to hear- that's my inspiration and bottom line. I just try to get ideas from books, movies, paintings.
Most books today seemed to have been written overnight from books read the day before.
I don't think there ever will be a biopic on me! I would much like some of my books to be made into films.
I suppose, because I've been able to make a very good living writing books, that going out and finding another million dollars under the sea is not the fascination. The fascination is in finding the ship.
Sometimes I don't like the books that I'm reading.
Oh yeah, I was one of the first guys writing comic books, I wrote Captain America, with guys like Stan Lee, who became famous later on with Marvel Comics.
I want children to be glued to interactive books that encourage singing and dancing. I feel when kids work together it brings about a different energy.
When I was in my early to mid-teens, that was a very heavy diet of science fiction and fantasy, so those were the kinds of books I tended to imagine writing someday, or even began to try to write.
Laws against homosexual behavior should remain on the books.
Diversity in books is a civil rights frontier.
In my experience, copy editors, like the stalwart staff I've worked with and learned from in my 34 years at 'TIME,' are linguistic conservatives - the keepers of the flame ignited by the Strunk-White 'Elements of Style,' published in full in 1957 and chosen by 'TIME' as one of the 100 most influential nonfiction books of the past century.
Learning is acquired by reading books, but the much more necessary learning, the knowledge of the world, is only to be acquired by reading men, and studying all the various facets of them.
