Human attention is limited, and a massive number of newly browsable books from the long tail necessarily compete with the biggest best-sellers, just as cable siphons audience from the major networks, and just as the Web pulls viewers from TV.
I actually wasn't much of a book reader at all before the 'Twilight' series. They just draw you in, and people love them. They're terrific books.
Normally, banks record profits on loans only as they are repaid, whether they securitize the loans or hold them on their books.
A major theme in all my books is that the CIA is not only the first line of defense but they should also be the first line of offense.
I don't read enough books, so I guess I'm pretty shallow. I'm a lot into the physical. With me, first attraction is never intellectual.
When I first met my husband, he had a very good job - company car, pension plan, grudging respect from his staff - the lot. I, on the other hand, was badly paid and devoid of ambition. Then I had a couple of books published and confounded all expectations by starting to earn more than he did.
I have been known to buy e-versions of my books because I was in a hotel room and I needed one right away to look up something in it; very handy for that - you can have it just the next minute; you can press the button and just have it.
Really important books to me are the classics. I try very hard to read them well - you know, especially once I got serious about writing. So, reading Tolstoy several times - 'War and Peace,' 'The Kreutzer Sonata' - all those were really important to me.
You have to understand that while I pre-plot the meta story of a given book, I often have no idea of what will happen on the next page, let alone the next chapter. That's what makes it fun for me; I write the books the same way many people read them.
I still buy actual books. The smell, having it in your hands - there's really no substitute.
Who I am, what I am, is the culmination of a lifetime of reading, a lifetime of stories. And there are still so many more books to read. I'm a work in progress.
It's ironic: In movies, the most successful films of all time have been sci-fi or fantasy. By far. But a lot of people won't even read science fiction books.
You know what that big number was? It was 1957. It's not the year I was born. I'm a little older than that. I wish it was the year I was born. It was the year one of my favorite books was written: 'Atlas Shrugged.' Ayn Rand.
When I was a boy, all the books I owned fit on a single shelf. Now I have several thousand stacked around the house.
Instead of reading a paper, we now read the news online. Instead of buying books at a store, we buy them on-line. What's so revolutionary? The Internet has mainly affected our leisure life.
I remember when I was in school I had this teacher give me this E.L. Doctorow quote: They asked him how much historical research he does for his books and he said, 'As little as possible.' So I try and adhere to that.
I don't like the vampire books. I don't like any of those.
Comic books have gone mainstream. The audience is there.
I grew up in Greeley, Colorado, in a house without a television set. I was a very nerdy kid: I used to play 'astronaut' and eat bouillon as astronaut food. We also had tons of books.
I've never been pigeonholed and I've experienced so many different kinds of skin - what man will do and won't do, what you should do and shouldn't do. This is what's exciting about being an actor; where philosophy majors sit in classrooms or write books about human behavior, we're actually acting them out in front of cameras.
My books have contradictions all the time - and people are fine with that.
I didn't read comic books, growing up. I was more of a science fiction/fantasy novel guy. I loved reading Edgar Rice Burroughs' 'Tarzan' and that kind of stuff.
What I find cool about being a banned author is this: I'm writing books that evoke a reaction, books that, if dropped in a lake, go down not with a whimper but a splash.
My freshman English professor at Kent State University in 1984 told me I was a good writer, and she loved all the silly pictures I drew in my notebook. She said I should try writing children's books, and so I did.
Jacqueline Rose was so wonderful in so many ways, and I was really blessed to be her daughter. Of all the things I am because of her - there's no question: I am a writer because of her love of books.
I remember being shocked when I discovered some of my school pals didn't have books in their homes. I thought it was like not having oxygen, or hot water.
I want to print books by people in the film industry.
At home I've got 1,500 cook books and the spines have all gone, the pages are all torn - it's chaos.
There's a tacit belief that actors shouldn't write books, they're sort of allowed to direct movies but there will be a lot of skepticism, and they shouldn't do artwork or music. There are these invisible roadblocks to gain entree to these areas for actors, and you kind of have to crash through those invisible barriers.
The stakes in my books tend to be kind of ridiculously high. In 'Kid vs. Squid,' the question is whether or not the California coast will be subsumed by the ocean in favor of the creation of a new Atlantis. In 'The Boy at the End of the World,' what's at stake is the survival of the human species.
I never read comic books as a kid.
My mother says that after I first visited the home of the man I later married, she knew it was serious when I told her, 'Mum, he has more books than me!' So, books are at the very heart of my life.
I think Congress can pass a bill when the American people start regaining trust in the administration to actually do their job and enforce the laws that are already on the books.
I often write two books simultaneously. Usually one of them starts out as a fun experiment designed to give me a daily break from the real book I'm writing. And then that becomes a real book too.
When I was a kid, my mum had a lot of Dumas books in the house, and she's from France originally. My mother had one particular Dumas book that was a family heirloom - this old, beat-up 1938 edition of 'The Count of Monte Cristo' in French. She came to America after losing her parents in World War II as a little kid.
When I was a child, I loved 'The Marble Faun' by Nathaniel Hawthorne. The reason I liked it was because it had a beautiful binding. When you're a kid, you like books because they're pretty to look at, and this one had a white calfskin cover and gold edges. That was enough to make me love it.
