I was obsessed with girls when I was 13 years old; I wasn't really into books.
It's rare that I read more than two or three books by any one author; usually only one.
I don't keep any copies of my books in the house - they go to my mum's flat. I don't like them around.
When I was a teenager, I was a voracious reader of crime fiction, but only contemporary books. I was not interested in reading 'The Glass Key' or 'The Maltese Falcon' - stuff that was 40 or 50 years old.
Recently I read that half the world or more has read 'The Lord of The Rings,' but then I found out that something like 75 per cent of the world knows the 'Tintin' books.
Sometimes you have to censor books. When I read 'Peter Rabbit,' I skip the part about Peter's father ending up in one of Mrs. McGregor's pies. I also hid the book of 'Grimm Fairy Tales.' They're just too grim for my grandkids. Reality will come soon enough.
Read, read, read. Read good books. You will strengthen your understanding of story. Your vocabulary will be the richer for it.
I don't live in books, but, boy, have books amplified my life.
I devour history books. I love anything by Thomas B. Costain or George MacDonald Fraser. He writes magnificent history, and he also wrote the Flashman stories, which are irresistible.
I don't know where everything is going, but I'm pretty confident that people like books - the objects. So I'm going to go on that -they're not going to disappear.
I've always been a little bit more of a novel reader than a short story reader. I think the first books that made me want to be a writer were novels.
People always tell me my books are so dark; I don't think they're particularly dark. I'm not like that. I'm quite a cheerful soul.
There were 900 books on Washington when I began writing on him.
I discovered Deborah Ellis's books in the school library after my head teacher encouraged me to go beyond the school curriculum and look for books I might enjoy.
Books are my art. The movie is someone else's art. But it's great marketing for books.
There are plenty of genre-crossover books, films, and games out there, but to do the job well, you have to do more than just smoosh a couple of 'in' concepts together, and hey presto, instant millions.
Naturally, everything boils down to relationships in my books.
I usually have two or three books on the go at the same time. If I'm in different moods, I want to read different things.
As a teenager I read a lot of books. Books with lots of scary trends, things like nuclear weapons and overpopulation and global diseases, and I thought, 'Wouldn't it be great to write stories that showed people these problems and that we could do something about them.'
I don't have the feeling that as a very young person I read books that absolutely made their mark on my mind.
I read more history books than anything else.
The readership for 'Sag Harbor' was different from people who'd read me before - it was linear and realistic, not as strange as 'The Intuitionist.' Did they carry over to 'Zone One,' a story about zombies in New York? Some, some not. I'm used to people not caring about my other books.
I recommend tidying by category, not by place. For example, instead of deciding that today you'll tidy a particular room, set goals such as 'clothes today, books tomorrow.'
When I'm in my car, I'm listening to books, audio books, always.
Books are mute as far as sound is concerned. It follows that reading aloud is a combination of two distinct operations, of two 'languages.' It is something far more complex than speaking and reading taken separately by themselves.
When the Internet came along, at first it was just a medium for moving text around - books first, then pictures, finally video. Each time the bandwidth expanded, so did the capabilities of the medium, and each time it happened, the Internet cannibalized preexisting formats. And each time, those formats had to adapt. Or die.
My dream when I was 14 was someday I could have a David Levine caricature of me in 'The New York Review of Books.'
The prolific Chinodya has written a number of striking books, most notably 'Dew in the Morning', an exploration of an idyllic rural boyhood; the sophisticated 'Strife,' in which sins from the pre-colonial past cast shadows into the present; and the rich and varied short-story collection 'Can We Talk?'
Books should be both enlightening and entertaining.
One of the lines from my books is about having respect for different minds, and if I had to have an epitaph at this point in my life, that would be it.
In America there is a public library in every community. How many public libraries are there in Africa? Every day there are new books coming out and new ideas being discussed. But these new books and ideas don't reach Africa and we are being left behind.
I don't read many business books. I read good fiction. Business is about people, so my favorite business books are anything by Dickens.
I'd always liked to read, but when I picked up books I wasn't getting the same kind of excitement from them that I was from going out clubbing. I wanted to get the same kind of feel.
I never got caught up in playing for history, seeing how many majors I could win, or rewriting the record books. Those are selfish objectives, and the guy who chokes usually does so because he dwells on what it all means to him. I was only worried about my family. And although I had my share of failures, it was never because I choked.
I found, through the process of doing 'The Perks of Being a Wallflower,' that I really love directing movies and I love writing books and so this will become the centerpiece of my career for the next ten or twenty years. Doing these adaptations.
The New York Times Bestseller 'The Amateur,' written by Ed Klein, former editor of the 'New York Times Magazine,' is one of the best books I've read.
