I always try to create conflict and drama in my books; it's the engine of the novel.
My name is Jarrett Krosoczka, and I write and illustrate books for children for a living. So I use my imagination as my full-time job.
Whether I'm on the road or at home, I get a great deal done on elliptical machines. I use my iPad to conquer my email inbox, listen to audio books, use my Voxer Walkie Talkie app, and read through documents.
Look at a book. A book is the right size to be a book. They're solar-powered. If you drop them, they keep on being a book. You can find your place in microseconds. Books are really good at being books, and no matter what happens, books will survive.
I don't write about myself. I'm never in my books.
I like Jo Nesbo and Hakan Nesser. There are so many good books in the world. I don't want to spend time reading bad crime novels.
'Walking the Bible' describes the year that I spent retracing the five books of Moses through the desert, and I was actually working on a follow-up, which would look at the rest of the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament.
I was told bedtime stories by my father or my grandmother. Books, I mostly read on my own in bed.
Those of us who know the transporting wonder of a reading life know that it little matters where we are when we talk about books or meet authors or bemoan the state of publishing because when we read, we are always inside, sheltered in that interior room, that clean, well-lighted, timeless place that is the written word.
We live in a dark time. Books are as dark as what is available to teenagers through the media every day.
Books have the power to be the light we are seeking at crucial moments in our lives. Reading helps us realize we are not alone, that we can change our circumstances and even achieve the impossible.
I've seen movies that are slavishly devoted to books but don't work because they haven't turned it into a movie: they've turned it into a dramatisation of the different scenes.
Let reverence for the laws be breathed by every American mother to the lisping babe that prattles on her lap - let it be taught in schools, in seminaries, and in colleges; let it be written in primers, spelling books, and in almanacs; let it be preached from the pulpit, proclaimed in legislative halls, and enforced in courts of justice.
Sometimes kids ask how I've been able to write so many books. The answer is simple: one word at a time. Which is another good lesson, I think. You don't have to do everything at once. You don't have to know how every story is going to end. You just have to take that next step, look for that next idea, write that next word.
I don't think many of us launched ourselves into the world of writing books fully formed.
I've been an art collector since the Sixties, and I kept it very separate from my showbusiness career. I've had art shows since the early Nineties, a museum show that travelled to four countries. I've had three or four art books; it's just another way I have to tell stories.
I suppose books are my real passion in life.
I like having a paperback original. And until literature catches up with the culture - the violence, language, syntax, compression, concision, complexity and diversity that the Internet offers - books still make sense.
A friend suggested that I get a job at a children's book store so I could meet kids and read books, and that turned out to be the single best bit of advice I've ever gotten.
My favorite books are psychology, self-help, and I'm fascinated by Jung, by dream work.
I can walk into a bookshop and point out a number of books that I find very unattractive in what they say. But it doesn't occur to me to burn the bookshop down. If you don't like a book, read another book. If you start reading a book and you decide you don't like it, nobody is telling you to finish it.
Seeing that we were book enthusiasts, my mother began hauling my sister and me down to the Stanton Free Library on Tuesday afternoons, where I'd find two or three books to bring home.
Even as a young child, I was a lover of books and of the spaces in which, as indeed in a sacred temple, books might safely reside.
I don't normally have time to read, so when I go away I like to take a few books.
Writing fiction is very different to writing non-fiction. I love writing novels, but on history books, like my biographies of Stalin or Catherine the Great or Jerusalem, I spend endless hours doing vast amounts of research. But it ends up being based on the same principle as all writing about people: and that is curiosity!
The Chinese have a habit of reading. Many families regard books as the most valuable family asset.
I have idea files of books that I want to write one of these days, stories I want to write one of these days, but I'll probably never get to them.
The only pleasure in redecorating or moving house comes from stumbling across books that I'd almost forgotten I owned.
If you think about movies that are adapted from books, they never feel like enough. There's always too much cut out in the end. You either make a five hour movie or you leave out stuff that should be in there.
I had gone to the bookstore, and while I hadn't bought any books on how to write a screenplay, I'd bought a couple of scripts so I could see how the formatting works. I just needed to know how a Hollywood screenplay looked on the page, which was something I was totally unfamiliar with.
I wish I had known that education is the key. That knowledge is power. Now I pick up books and watch educational shows with my husband. I'm seeing how knowledge can elevate you.
Books and theater were the way I understood the world and also the way I organized my sense of morality, of how to live a good life.
I have nothing but praise for J. K. Rowling. Her contribution - apart from the books themselves, obviously - is showing writers how to interact with the 21st Century.
I'm kind of surprised that so many of those other books were almost exactly like mine. They even follow the form. There were some books that even copied the stamp. It shows so little imagination.
On the advice of my U.K. publishers, I chose a sexless anonymity and published my first five books under the semi-pseudonym, S. J. Bolton. I was happy. I could hide behind a genderless, classless persona and let my creepy, psychological murder-mysteries speak for themselves.
'The Narrow Road to the Deep North' is one of the most famous books of all Japanese literature, written by the great poet Basho in 1689.