'Get Skinny' is my sixth book. I look over the books that I've written, and my subject matters are varied, and I write books pertaining to that which I'm dealing with at the moment.
It is much simpler to buy books than to read them and easier to read them than to absorb their contents.
Jewish villages were built in the place of Arab villages. You do not even know the names of these Arab villages, and I do not blame you because geography books no longer exist.
If sex is such a natural phenomenon, how come there are so many books on how to do it?
I've written a lot of books in my time, and to write a book about Joe McCarthy and have some of the major media paying attention, I'm not used to that.
Most history books are about power.
Today's public figures can no longer write their own speeches or books, and there is some evidence that they can't read them either.
I had still never read one of the Bond books when the movie Dr. No came out.
Women's books are kind of discriminated against. If a man writes a book about his family stories, people think of it as literature. If it's a woman, she's 'spilling her guts,' and it's not art.
A lot of people write books not at the end of their career. Why you gotta wait until then? When you're momentum's going, that's when people really want to get to know about you.
In 1986 we were trying to help women get in print, stay in print, and come to the attention of booksellers and libraries. At that time, books by men mystery writers were reviewed seven times as often as books by women.
Books don't exist unless you read them. And it's a two way process - you write the book as you read it and you fill in the gaps. You discover it and you put the marks together and without you doing it they're just marks.
The more books there are on shelves, the more will be sold. Once you get to the level of The Secret and have 40-100 copies in many stores, managers have almost no choice but to put them in prime real estate like front-of-store, end caps, or front window.
I started writing books for children because I could illustrate them myself and because, in my innocence, I thought they'd be easier.
Reading for me will be a combination of books, magazines, Tumblr and just kind of the Web in general on the iPad.
You could say, in a vulgar Freudian way, that I am the unhappy child who escapes into books. Even as a child, I was most happy being alone. This has not changed.
I'm a pretty decent writer. It comes easy to me. I don't agonize over sentences. I write like I talk. I try to make them good books.
However, I survived and started to read all chemistry books that I could get a hand on, first some 19th century books from our home library that did not provide much reliable information, and then I emptied the rather extensive city library.
One of the maddening ironies of writing books is that it leaves so little time for reading others'. My bedside is piled with books, but it's duty reading: books for book research, books for review. The ones I pine for are off on a shelf downstairs.
I'm excited about how books work in a digital age. When you read a book, unlike a film, you are decoding symbols in order to 'see' the story, so it is collaborative in a way that a film can never be.
I don't like Communism because it hands out wealth through rationing books.
Always in my books, I like to throw that rogue element into a stable situation and then see what happens.
I read less and less. I have not forgiven books for their failure to tell me the truth and make me happy.
This is a profession for me, but I started off as a self-publisher working on my own schedule and my own stuff before moving on to graphic novels with First Second Books, where there was definitely a schedule, but it was very different from monthly comics.
I don't write for publishers, certainly not for critics, and not for readers, But I am delighted that so many people have found my books enjoyable and want to continue to read them.
All books are divisible into two classes, the books of the hour, and the books of all time.
The wise are above books.
The importance and influence of books on me has been cumulative: the result of hearing and reading lots of stories about interesting people and places.
I spent many hours ensconced in the local library, reading - nay, devouring - book after book after book. Books were my soul's delight.
Television and cable have become the new independent films, in a sense, for writers and actors to gravitate towards. That's why I like short films, too; I love doing readings, audio books, working with young filmmakers; anything that keeps you from getting blase about yourself or in a rut.
Where nothing in a person's earlier years lends itself to an old age devoted to continuing intellectual and physical pursuits, a late-life interest in Tolstoy or even crossword puzzles is unlikely to appear, no matter the urging by well-intentioned social workers or people like me who write books about it.
There's only one set of books I've written that I knew was going to be more than one book at the beginning, and those are the 'Missing Link' books.
If I lose, then I have to accept that my way of writing books is not the way society says it's okay to write.
There's something about the idea of writing, and thinking about writing as a form of prayer - the way as a writer you call out into the world and throw your words into the world. You're not praying to a god, but you're almost conjuring a reader to arrive. That's what books do: they're an invitation to readers.
Books have shown me horror and beauty.
I am not by any stretch of the imagination a tidy person, and the piles of unread books on the coffee table and by my bed have a plaintive, pleading quality to me - 'Read me, please!'