I was always an avid reader of books. My vocabulary, my English are all thanks to that reading habit. Reading keeps me grounded. I came from a very middle class family - poor, in fact.
You cannot write for children They're much too complicated. You can only write books that are of interest to them.
I'm a writer. In Latin America, they say I'm a Latin-American writer because I also write in Spanish and my books are translated, but I am an American citizen and my books are published here, so I'm also an American writer.
When people write fan-fic sequels to one of your books, it gives you a very strange feeling. It is very flattering but strange, as if the characters have come to life again without you knowing.
Kids don't read as much as you'd like them to, just in terms of seeing the world from different perspectives. I mean, that's the great thing about books, still. Here's television, here are the movies, and it's pretty limited in terms of the perspectives.
When I did start writing books, I didn't realize it, but the girls that grew up watching the show became moms.
The books are like children in that having written one doesn't make writing the next one any easier, because it's a new set of problems and a new set of challenges with each one, and having dealt with one before means that you now know how to do it.
Many writers tend to write summing-up books at the end of their lives.
I think many of my books, including 'Handle with Care,' including 'My Sister's Keeper,' circle back to how far are we willing to go for the people we love? I think love changes the way we think. It's the thing that takes you out of what your normal set of beliefs would be.
I grew up in the 1970s, but I don't think a whole lot had changed from the '60s. Oh, it had changed in the law books - but not in the kitchens of white homes.
I'd never have written the big books in London.
Amazon is such a big player in publishing, but a lot of authors feel this connection to their publishing house and their editors who helped them get their books out there, so their loyalties tend to go that way.
For a highly motivated learner, it's not like knowledge is secret and somehow the Internet made it not secret. It just made knowledge easy to find. If you're a motivated enough learner, books are pretty good.
Again, we turn down most books that have been self-published unless they have a special track record. We have taken a small number on, however, and sold them to major publishers for a nice sum. But that is an exception to the rule.
A theme in a lot of my books - and in my own life - is making choices that you feel you should make, or what society wants you to make, as opposed to what is truly right for you.
While books provided me with some escape from the mental and physical horrors of my early life, they were unreliable. Many times the protagonists suffered terribly and then died at the end.
Non-fiction books have helped me enormously with lots of my books.
One way an author dies a little each day is when his books go out of print.
I fear becoming formulaic. Some of my books are.
I like books that have razor-sharp plotting that snaps and moves along. It's not about the main character being different at the end. I don't want my main character to be different in the end. I still want him committed to his ideas, to be steadfast, true and loyal.
I think my books are lighter and funnier than some of the big series out there. You may not walk away from my books having learned a life-altering lesson, but you will feel better for having laughed for a few hours. It's just a different style of writing.
Self-help books are for the birds. Self-help groups are where it's at.
My interior is very, very dense - Proustian-looking, sort of Henry James. The walls are covered in pictures, and I transformed the big drawing room into a library lined with books.
I probably shouldn't admit this since I work in the tech industry, but I still prefer reading paper books.
His knowledge of books had in some degree diminished his knowledge of the world.
I worked at a nursing home though high school... There's a lost appreciation for a generation that has so much to tell us when we're so full of self-help books and doctors on TV.
Though I loved books as a young boy, I loved sports even more. I wanted to be a quarterback in the CFL.
Books are the heart of any home, and I spend hours going through books for design inspiration.
Most of the books I remember from my childhood were Dr. Seuss-type books. They were fun to read, but there wasn't a real story behind them.
We wanted to describe society from our Left point of view. Per had written political books, but they'd only sold 300 copies. We realised that people read crime and through the stories we could show the reader that under the official image of welfare-state Sweden there was another layer of poverty, criminality and brutality.
I remember when I was a kid, I could never find anything positive about chubby girls. If a girl was pudgy in books, she wasn't okay. She couldn't be happy or make friends unless she lost weight.
Schools still operate as if all knowledge is contained in books, and as if the salient points in books must be stored in each human brain - to be used when needed. The political and financial powers controlling schools decide what these salient points are.
I've got a nice car. I love my job. I've got a bagel store, and I have breakfast every morning with friends I grew up with. I've been in movies, I've written books - I don't know how that all happened.
I write books to find out about things.
Never loan a book to someone if you expect to get it back. Loaning books is the same as giving them away.
Estimates are that in 2012, more than 32 million books were available - the explosion, thanks to the ease of self-publishing; 2013 could see even more titles grace our virtual bookstores! That means we are going to be awash in covers and titles, plot descriptions and characters.
