I was obsessed with Val McDermid's Tony Hill and Carol Jordan books, delightfully twisted stuff.
The marketplace for books when I entered the business shortly after World War II consisted of a thousand or so well stocked independent booksellers in major towns and cities supplemented by thousands of smaller shops that carried limited stocks of mostly current titles along with greeting cards, toys and so on.
I don't think about who the audience is for my books.
I am aiming my books at anybody with no economics background.
The only book in our home was the Bible. My parents forbade books. They thought I needed help because I wanted to be a writer!
As a kid, I lived almost entirely inside books, and eventually the books started returning the favor. A lot of my internal world feels like an anthology, or a library. It's eclectic and disorganized, but I can browse in it, and that hugely shapes both what and how I write.
As an object itself, to me, books today are such a rare entity - I want mine to be something where, if left on the kitchen table, a child could pick it up. It can visually tell a story.
I had no ambition to be a writer because the books I read were too good, my standards were too high.
I've always had ideas for more books than I can write.
There are no easy answers for the balance of how you protect the core business of the books with what the digital future will look like, but that would be our job with DC Comics, to figure that out and experiment and take some risks while always protecting the core business.
Because I've a track record of talking about books I never write, in Australia they think I'm about to write a book about Jane Austen. Something I said at some festival.
In refugee camps around the world, I met people who were gone. They were still walking around but had lost so much that they were unable to claim any sort of identity. Others I met found who they truly were, and they generally found it through service to others. They became teachers when there was no school, books or pencils.
As you can tell from the titles of my books, I like to probe secret organizations, secret subjects. And this sometimes gets me into trouble.
I am a huge fan of world-building. I love doing it in my own books, and I love reading it done well.
My mother was a Book of the Month Club devotee. I remember she always looked forward to Pearl Buck's books.
I long ago ran out of bookshelf space and so, like a museum with its art, simply rotate my books from the boxes to the shelves and back again.
Each of my books is different. Deliberately... I wanted to create my society, my people, in their fullness.
The books that really made an impact on me were not set in New Zealand. Some were New Zealand novels, but the New Zealandness of them was not what carried me or excited me.
I've always had a soft spot for comic books. I learned to read from them. The words in them were so interesting.
When I was 11 or 12, I was really bored with everything on my summer reading list. It was all happy, middle-grade kinds of books. I was getting frustrated, because I liked to read. My mother went to the library and got me a copy of 'The Other Side of Midnight' by Sidney Sheldon. It was my first adult book.
Picture books are for everybody at any age, not books to be left behind as we grow older. The best ones leave a tantalising gap between the pictures and the words, a gap that is filled by the reader's imagination, adding so much to the excitement of reading a book.
There are books all around me... I don't read as much as I used to, but I always have a book or two going.
It's our job - as parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles - to find books our kids are going to like.
Books are finished.
I knew I loved writing, and I was raised by people who love books.
I read real books. On paper. You know, those printed books? I feel like this is the last thing I do to support my industry. I think they smell great, too.
I have read only the first 'Harry Potter' book. I thought it excellent, perhaps the best thing written for older children since The Hobbit. I wish the books had been around when my kids were the right age for them.
Over at Marvel, I have a five-part series coming out very soon. The books or chapters will appear weekly. It's called '5 Ronin' and features some iconic Marvel heroes as you've never seen them.
I vowed to myself that when I grew up and became a theoretical physicist, in addition to doing research, I would write books that I would have liked to have read as a child. So whenever I write, I imagine myself, as a youth, reading my books, being thrilled by the incredible advances being made in physics and science.
Books give us insight into other people, other cultures. They make us laugh. They make us think. If they are really good, they make us believe that we are better for having read them. You don't read a book - you experience it. Every story opens up a new world.
I just write books, and I do it without any notion of what I should do or shouldn't do.
I get daily mentions in blogs, I get mentions in Twitter and in different social media... I know that gets books sold.
I go on a good many adventure-type trips. Whenever I go on one, it's always potentially going to be the setting for one of my books. I pay more attention to certain aspects than some other people might. Sometimes I use them, sometimes I don't. Most of the books I write are based on experiences I've had to some extent.
You put books out into the world, and people form their own visuals and images and attachments to characters; those characters become part of them, and they have their feelings about them.
What society doesn't realize is that in the past, ordinary people respected learning. They respected books, and they don't now, or not very much. That whole respect for serious literature and learning has disappeared.
You eventually have to figure out how to balance the books. So that's the reason I gave up my day job to come do this was to go fight to create the space where spending matches America's capacity to tax, and that means economic growth and a smaller, humbler federal government.
