I have written about Chile extensively, and therefore I have read many books on the subject, mostly for research.
I wrote a few children’s books… not on purpose.
But, you know, I just did a big trip in the spring to Vietnam and Cambodia and Thailand, and that’s when I bought a Kindle. I have like 15 books on this one little gizmo. But when I came home, the first night I picked up the book that was on my nightstand and I went right back to that.
We must enforce the laws we have on the books, secure our borders, and deny special benefits to illegal immigrants such as in-state tuition rates. This approach is best for American citizens and is fair to those who have taken the time and effort to go through the legal immigration process.
I would never require anyone to read any book. That seems antithetical to why we read – which is to choose a book for our personal reasons. I always shudder when I’m told my books are on required reading lists.
My mom says: ‘Why aren’t you a doctor?’ and I’m like, ‘I am a doctor!’ and she’s all, ‘No, I mean a real doctor.’ She reads my books, but she says they give her a headache.
Sometimes people ask if my books have morals or lessons for readers, and I shudder at that thought. I always say that I have more questions than answers.
When I die there may be a paragraph or two in the newspapers. My name will linger in the British Museum Reading Room catalogue for a space at the head of a long list of books for which no one will ever ask.
Often I hear people say they do not have time to read. That’s absolute nonsense. In the one year during which I kept that kind of record, I read twenty-five books while waiting for people. In offices, applying for jobs, waiting to see a dentist, waiting in a restaurant for friends, many such places.
My passion has always been books and literature, and teaching.
Italy is full of historical buildings. And Europe holds a great history of philosophy from Greece until today. I read all those books and see these buildings, and I think of where I stand when I design my architecture.
I’ve got beautiful reviews for all my books, and I’m very well thought of in the tiny circles that know me, but I’m really starving.
I’m snobby about books that aren’t crime fiction: if I start reading a literary novel and there’s no mystery emerging in the first few pages, I’m like, ‘Gah, this obviously isn’t a proper book. Why would I want to carry on reading it?’
Upon books the collective education of the race depends; they are the sole instruments of registering, perpetuating and transmitting thought.
In the offseason I allow my body to recover, my mind to recover. I like to be with my family, to read books, and know what is going on in the world, to understand how people think.
Censorship is a strange situation. There was times when people would burn books because they didn’t like what people were doing.
I think you’d have to literally live in a cave to not know anything about ‘Twilight’. I’ve seen a few of the movies, but I haven’t read the books.
I read a lot, but in comparison to my family, it’s nothing. I keep telling them, ‘I’m the illiterate of the family.’ My grandfather used to read five books at a time.
I got the idea for ‘Throne of Glass’ when I was sixteen. Music always inspires my books, and when I was listening to the ‘Cinderella’ soundtrack, I thought, ‘What if Cinderella was actually an assassin who liked getting dressed up all pretty and going to the ball, but then she wouldn’t mind kicking butt?’
Earth and sky, woods and fields, lakes and rivers, the mountain and the sea, are excellent schoolmasters, and teach some of us more than we can ever learn from books.
I loved books; I read my childhood away. I was more interested in my interior world.
It’s been said that the men in my books have been absent, or weak, or creepy.
All that I know about my life, it seems, I have learned in books.
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 do like books on anatomy. I have to say I’m an amateur physician, I guess.
History books that contain no lies are extremely dull.
By 2025, we can expect the world to be completely digital. Paper books will be a thing of the past. Education will be delivered through analytics-based assessment tools and adaptive learning platforms.
There is a prevailing school of thought that something good must take time, sometimes years to create and hone. I have always felt that the books I have written fastest have been my best – because I caught an unstoppable momentum in the writing.
One of the reasons I love writing for middle graders, besides their voracious appetite for books, is their deep concern for fairness and morality.
There are a lot of Chinese comics, but the Chinese comics tend to be more historical and conservative. Japanese culture, just the comics are amazing. They’re like films: very few words; they move so much in these books with hundreds of pages.
When I write, I try to think back to what I was afraid of or what was scary to me, and try to put those feelings into books.
In the case of good books, the point is not to see how many of them you can get through, but how many can get through to you.
I used to get a haircut every Saturday so I would never miss any of the comic books. I had practically no hair when I was a kid!
If there is one thing I hope my books do always and forever, it’s that they honor working people.
Be careful about reading health books. You may die of a misprint.
As it turned out, if you look at the history, everything in superhero comic books pretty much lies between Superman and Batman: Superman being the greatest superhero there is, and Batman being the one of the few superheroes who has no superpowers and is, in fact, not a superhero.
Books give not wisdom where none was before. But where some is, there reading makes it more.
All of the books in the world contain no more information than is broadcast as video in a single large American city in a single year. Not all bits have equal value.
I don’t read books much.
My first two books are out of print and, okay, they can sleep there comfortably. It’s early work, derivative work.
There are books on our shelves we haven’t read and doubtless never will, that each of us has probably put to one side in the belief that we will read them later on, perhaps even in another life.
From a child I was fond of reading, and all the little money that came into my hands was ever laid out in books. Pleased with the ‘Pilgrim’s Progress,’ my first collection was of John Bunyan’s works in separate little volumes.
My attitudes have changed, but somebody would have to read all my books to find out how they have.
The printing press did something really big for the world when everyone could get books in their hands and read.
If I see Marian Keyes’ books or Patricia Scanlan’s books given more prominence than mine in the bookstore, I’ll move mine to the front. I’ve told them I do this, and they’ve confessed to doing the same thing to me.
A lot of my books have started with an abstract premise.
Books, like proverbs, receive their chief value from the stamp and esteem of the ages through which they have passed.
About 15 years ago I went though a period of a year or so when I just couldn’t find anything good. My wife noticed I was having trouble reading menus. I bought some cheap reading glasses in a drug store. I got home and suddenly all these books that weren’t good were good.
I’m a geophysicist and all my earth science books when I was a student, I had to give the wrong answer to get an A. We used to ridicule continental drift. It was something we laughed at. We learned of Marshall Kay’s geosynclinal cycle, which is a bunch of crap.
My husband and I like to reminisce about how, when we were 9, we read straight through L. Frank Baum’s ‘Oz’ series, books filled with wizards and witches. And you know what those subversive tales taught us? That we loved to read!
I didn’t go to school a full year until I was 11 or 12, so I lived in books. I really was an observer of life.
I don’t have a real home. When I got ‘Avatar,’ I sold everything that I owned because I knew it was going to be a long journey. I’ve got two bags, and that was four years ago, and I’ve been working ever since, and I’ve still only got two bags – a bag of books and a bag of clothes. That’s about it.
The best students come from homes where education is revered: where there are books, and children see their parents reading them.
I love to walk into Borders or Barnes & Noble and see my books there. It’s fabulous.
We do not need to proselytise either by our speech or by our writing. We can only do so really with our lives. Let our lives be open books for all to study.
But a girl of seventeen is not always thinking of books, especially in the Oxford summer term.
For books are more than books, they are the life, the very heart and core of ages past, the reason why men worked and died, the essence and quintessence of their lives.
The Classics are those books which constitute a treasured experience for those who have read and loved them; but they remain just as rich an experience for those who reserve the chance to read them for when they are in the best condition to enjoy them.
