To come out and meet kids who have my books in their hands is kind of amazing.
There is a certain danger in thinking about diversity in its own little box, as something that is somehow separate from 'normal' comic books and comics creators.
It seems to me that in literature, books have always been answers to other books.
A good part of 'The Information' is about the transition from an oral to a literary culture. Books effected such a great transformation in the way we think about the world, our history, our logic, mathematics, you name it. I think we would be greatly diminished as a people and as a culture if the book became obsolete.
I've stopped reading about the death of books because it's wasteful and morbid and insulting to the authors, agents, publishers, booksellers, critics, and readers that keep the world community of fiction interesting.
I didn't really like reading much before I did 'The Golden Compass'. But then my teacher told me to read it. And I thought, 'Oh God, I'm going to have to read a whole book by myself!' It's not that I couldn't read, it's just that I didn't really like books very much. But the book that she lent me I really enjoyed.
One of my books, called 'Moscow Station,' revealed that a KGB archivist had defected from Russia to the FBI. And I knew that he was safe, and revealing this would not jeopardize him. But nevertheless, the FBI started a leak investigation.
I'm very, very leery of nonfiction books where they change timeframes and use - what do they call those things? - composite characters. I don't think that's right.
In a certain way, novelists become unacknowledged historians, because we talk about small, tiny, little anonymous moments that won't necessarily make it into the history books.
I made the decision that I didn't want to spend my life in rooms and write about rooms, or else make books that are researched constructs. I think you do have to get out there and live it. Thriller and genre writers seem to understand this.
During the Spanish conquest of Mesoamerica in the 16th century, the Catholic Church's Friar Diego de Landa supervised the burning of hundreds of Maya codices - fig-bark books rich in mythological and astronomical information. Only four Maya codices are known to have survived.
Carnegie Hall is as good as they say it is. It's not like Stonehenge which looks great in books but then you go there and it's a pile of rocks next to a highway. There's actually a highway right next to it, but you don't see that in pictures.
You can only learn so much from books. You can only learn so much from education. Ultimately, it is the wisdom of God that will carry you through in the toughest situations of life.
Books were a huge part of my childhood growing up. We would go on vacation, and my mom was always carting manuscripts around.
Good travel books, like travel itself, open the door to new worlds. In the strongest works the author's vision becomes our own, especially if his or her subject is a distant destination.
I stay out of politics because if I begin thinking too much about politics, I'll probably... drop writing children's books and become a political cartoonist again.
I have friends who are writers who have had movies made of their books, and they are almost uniformly horrified about what's been done - or, at least, dissatisfied.
It should be said upfront that I totally dig people who work in bookstores and libraries. They love books, and I love books, and that is all I really need to know. If they are friendly to me, then we are clearly soul mates.
Whether I'm at the office, at home, or on the road, I always have a stack of books I'm looking forward to reading.
I don't reread my books after they're published, because it's agony.
Adult novels are as ephemeral as newspapers. Children's books stay in print for decades.
There is a very definite Russian heart in me; that never dies. I think you're born and you live your life with it and you die with it. I'm very much an American - my books tend to be about American things, but inside there's that sort of tortured, long-suffering, aching, constantly analysing Russian soul underneath the happy American exterior.
I used to love comic books, and I love American comedy, and neither are afraid to tackle big themes.
I love story songs because I've always loved books.
I don't really have a domestic inclination. Even my apartment has a semblance of a storage facility. It's just stacks, there are no bookshelves, just books and piles of stamp collections and weird little sewing and knitting projects.
I was a semiotics major at Brown, and there's this idea that stories are better, books are better, and movies are better if they cocked you off your axis and you were completely disoriented and you'd really have to rethink everything. Nobody has that experience, actually.
My books don't sell anymore. There are many reasons why they don't sell, but one of the reasons is because people don't read anymore. Forget about reading books of detail - they don't read at all.
In some Old Testament books, it's very evident that an editor has been at work. That's quite all right. It's part of the process.
I think I learned about the relationship between books and life from Margaret Mitchell.
I remember being in the public library and my jaw just aching as I looked around at all those books I wanted to read. There just wasn't time enough to read everything I wanted to read.
There's been resistance to every new technology that's ever been introduced. When books came out hundreds of years ago, there were complaints that it would destroy the oral tradition. Some of those fears were justified, but it didn't stop the rise of the written word. And books have proven to be incredibly useful.
There were a lot of things I loved about working in a library, but mostly I miss the library patrons. I love books, but books are everywhere. Library patrons are as various and oddball and democratic as library books.
To return to the books of my childhood is to yield to the strain of nostalgia that is curious about the self I once was.
One of the great things about writing middle-grade books is that it's really a nice break, when you're writing super intense stuff like 'Coldtown', to be able to write something a little lighter - calm down and do something different.
Old Arabic books, printed in Bulaq, generally have a broad margin wherein a separate work, independent of the text, adds gloom to the page.
I was that weird kid that checked out all of the non-fiction paranormal studies books from the library. I've always been fascinated by the supernatural, particularly movies and TV shows that manage to blend humor with the horror - 'Supernatural', 'Buffy', 'Angel.'
