I didn't go to school a full year until I was 11 or 12, so I lived in books. I really was an observer of life.
I can't seem to help writing love stories. I definitely crave romance. When I was young, I craved romance in books, but I didn't want to read just romance - love plays such a big part in our lives, it shouldn't be cut out and restricted to its own fiction.
I only keep books that I like very much. Otherwise I'd throw them out.
I love books. I want to read them, and I want to own them so they're always available to be reread.
I don't put a lot of description in the books because I write books the way I like to read them, and that is I like to build images and be a creative reader, and so I write that way.
I have also written a book about the Giving of the Torah, and a book on the Days of Awe, and a book on the books of Israel that have been written since the day the Torah was given to Israel.
I came to comic books when I was about 15.
My favorite books are actually very complicated - 'One Hundred Years of Solitude', 'Ulysses'.
Compared with my brother, I always felt like Richard III, some clever humpbacked thing who surpassed him in the end. He was the one who read books, but I became the writer. He painted and drew, but I was the one who got accepted by the High School of Music and Art.
I think there's going to be something that happens now, where books move in two directions, one toward digitized formats and one toward remembering what's nice about the physicality of them.
I don't have a real home. When I got 'Avatar,' I sold everything that I owned because I knew it was going to be a long journey. I've got two bags, and that was four years ago, and I've been working ever since, and I've still only got two bags - a bag of books and a bag of clothes. That's about it.
I read a lot of fantasy. I adored 'Anne of Green Gables'. But my favourite books as a child were probably Laura Ingalls Wilder's 'Little House' series, about a pioneer family in the mid-19th-century American west. I often thought of them as I was writing 'The Last Runaway'.
All that I know about my life, it seems, I have learned in books.
Scholarship was one thing, drudgery another. I very soon concluded that nothing would induce me to read, let alone make notes on, hundreds and hundreds of very, very, very boring books.
I didn't become a good writer until I learned how to rewrite. And I don't just mean fixing spelling and adding a comma. I rewrite each of my books five or six times, and each time I change huge portions of the story.
I read books like mad, but I am careful to to let anything I read influence me.
I like books on tape, and will listen to just about anything.
I first began to read religious books at school, and especially the Bible, when I was eleven years old; and almost immediately commenced a habit of secret prayer.
I have a shelf of comfort books, which I read when the world closes in on me or something untoward happens.
Publishers have realized that, unlike the previous time period, American teenagers are both smarter and require more topical material than they had been giving them before that. For one thing, they'll read thicker books. Besides, has anybody looked at the news or read the newspapers recently?
I come from a family of writers. My mom had been a writer, nonfiction books, and her mother was a playwright in the 1930s and '40s. And my twin brother, Alexi, is a writer on 'The Following.'
I am quite convinced now... that the actual training of drawing cartoons - which is, of course, my style - led to my producing Spot. Cartoons must be very simple and have as few words as possible, and so, too, must the 'Spot' books.
Next, in importance to books are their titles.
A single conversation across the table with a wise man is better than ten years mere study of books.
I read my books aloud before they were published.
My first biography was 'Our Golda: The Life of Golda Meir.' To research that book, I bought a 1905 set of encyclopedias. Those books told me what each of the places Golda Meir lived in were like when she lived there.
My temper is of a recluse and contemplative cast; had it been otherwise, I should, perhaps, on some former occasions, have entered into the active concerns of the world and not have been connected with it merely as a writer of books.
I do feel that Paula Deen should not have lost her job, and I've said this on the air. The marketplace should have decided. The marketplace decided something different. Her books are No. 1.
I've been reading a lot of books on history, and watching a lot of educational TV. Wikipedia too, even though it is not reliable.
My wife gave me a year to start making money out of writing, and after six months, I'd made not a bean. Suddenly, the books took off, and the beans started coming in!
I've never been a fast reader. I'm fickle; I don't finish books I start; I put a book aside for five, ten years and then take it up again.
I've always loved flowers, as a little girl I'd collect flower objects and little flower books. Now I love flowers on my night table and on my desk.
An ordinary man can surround himself with two thousand books and thenceforward have at least one place in the world in which it is possible to be happy.
London has always provided the landscape for my imagination. It becomes a character - a living being - within each of my books.
From the Olympian heights of an executive suite, in an atmosphere where your success is judged by the extent to which you can maximise profits, the overwhelming tendency must be to see people as units of production, as indices in your accountants' books.
I have friends who read my books in Greek.
