If you write a book about a bygone period that lies east of the Mississippi River, then it’s a historical novel. If it’s west of the Mississippi, it’s a western, a different category. There’s no sense to it.
Time travel may be achieved one day, or it may not. But if it is, it should not require any fundamental change in world-view, at least for those who broadly share the world view I am presenting in this book.
Ideally a book would have no order to it, and the reader would have to discover his own.
I enjoyed doing the gag covers better than the story ones because they were usually simpler. A cover based on an incident in the plot took a great deal of staging to tell a little story that was still part of the book. And it had to make sense on its own.
A real book is not one that we read, but one that reads us.
I taught myself to read when I was three by comparing the letters in my Mother Goose book with the rhymes I had memorised.
I want to create a collection, almost like a trilogy of sorts. Whereas ‘Milk and Honey’ was very much like holding a mirror up to yourself, the second book is turning that mirror around and fixing it on the world. The book is a reflection of the times we are in.
If you’re going to call a book ‘The Politically Incorrect Guide to American History,’ readers will expect some serious carrying on about race, and Thomas Woods Jr. does not disappoint.
If a man writes a book, let him set down only what he knows. I have guesses enough of my own.
When you write your first book aged 25 or so, you have 25 years of experience, albeit much of it juvenile experience. The second book comes after an extra year sitting in bookshops. Pretty soon, you begin to run on empty.
The covers of this book are too far apart.
A novel ensures that we can look before and after, take action at whatever pace we choose, read again and again, skip and go back. The story in a book is humble and serviceable, available, friendly, is not switched on and off but taken up and put down, lasts a lifetime.
The two things I was positive about in life were that I was going to be a teacher at a boarding school or an operative with the CIA posted abroad. I could write a book about all the things I was sure about.
The book is not really the container for the book. The book itself is the narrative. It’s the thing that people create.
Certainly in the case of ‘Kill Your Friends,’ a book I wrote more than 10 years ago, I routinely meet interviewers who appear to know the book better than I do. But still, you have to talk about it.
Usually a feeling of disappointment follows the book, because what I hoped to write is not what I actually accomplished. However, it becomes a motivation to write the next book.
What a book a devil’s chaplain might write on the clumsy, wasteful, blundering, low, and horribly cruel work of nature!
I don’t read ‘chick lit,’ fantasy or science fiction but I’ll give any book a chance if it’s lying there and I’ve got half an hour to kill.
If you want a favorite book, Orson Scott Card’s ‘Ender’s Game’. You’ll be hooked. I think he’s written like twelve or thirteen.
I think Stevie Wonder could sing the phone book and manage to make me cry.
My ‘Book of Prayer’ is the most important thing I carry. If I’m tense about something or need to pray for protection for my kids, it always helps.
I don’t have a process; I just feel it. My book on acting would be very short.
When I see Kate Moss out and about, I think she looks more beautiful than when her hairdresser and make-up artist try and make her look like something else. And I remember when Madonna first asked Versace to book me to shoot a campaign with her, she came to see me wearing hardly any make-up, and she looked incredible.
I believe that a government has only one religion – India first. A government has only one holy book – our Constitution. A government has only one kind of devotion – towards nation.
A reader can never tell if it’s a real thimble or an imaginary thimble, because by the time you’re reading it, they’re the same. It’s a thimble. It’s in the book.
To produce a mighty book, you must choose a mighty theme. No great and enduring volume can ever be written on the flea, though many there be that have tried it.
I don’t think it’s the writer’s job to give answers or to give opinions. In fact, when a writer has answers, I think the work ends up being corrupted. It becomes didactic. What a book does is share a consciousness and invite people to explore the questions as best as you can.
‘Extraordinary’ is an original fairy tale, a contemporary story. But like a traditional fairy tale, it heads quickly into frightening, bloody territory. I am afraid for my book, as it goes out alone into the world, just as I was frightened for Phoebe as I wrote and rewrote her story.
Oh, I just want what we all want: a comfortable couch, a nice beverage, a weekend of no distractions and a book that will stop time, lift me out of my quotidian existence and alter my thinking forever.
I’ve always believed in writing without a collaborator, because where two people are writing the same book, each believes he gets all the worry and only half the royalties.
I would never want to hurt anyone by writing a book.
Bliss is the ocean, a towel on the sand, the sun out, the chance to swim in waves or walk dragging a stick behind you, a good book, a cold drink.
These days it seems that every big, new, heavily promoted children’s book is rather like the ghost of poor old Jacob Marley. Each one comes trailing a long, clanking chain of references – in the form of overexcited press releases and slightly hysterical jacket blurbs – to bestsellers of a supposedly similar nature.
My first book was called, ‘Mountain, Get Out of My Way,’ where I did an autobiographical sketch, if you will, looking back at myself and looking back at things in my life, and juxtaposing them against things that are happening in other people’s lives and trying to be motivational.
No one would want to read a book in which I explain the science of cloning because it would be very dull and it would also make no sense.
‘The Silence of the Lambs’ is my favourite book, favourite film.
I’ve found I get big things done when I’m on airplanes or in hotel rooms. It’s a total needle-mover to book a fantastic room in a place you adore and then put the ‘do not disturb’ on the phone and door for a week.
When you’re writing a book, with people in it as opposed to animals, it is no good having people who are ordinary, because they are not going to interest your readers at all. Every writer in the world has to use the characters that have something interesting about them, and this is even more true in children’s books.
In my college years, I would retreat to our summer house for two weeks in June to read a novel a day. How exciting it was, after pouring my coffee and making myself comfortable on the porch, to open the next book on the roster, read the first sentences, and find myself on the platform of a train station.
Every song has a composer, every book has an author, every car has a maker, every painting has a painter, and every building has a builder. So it isn’t irrational to take this simple logic a little further and say that nature must have had a Maker. It would be irrational to believe that it made itself.
It took me 11 years to struggle through one dumb book, and every day you just want to give up. But you don’t find out you’re an artist because you do something really well.
You know, after filming the movie the book was still just as big. I think it was actually bigger. I think Stephen King went back and wrote extra pages. He’s fantastic.
I think we have a great deal of mythology around writing. We believe that only a few people can really do it. I wrote a book called ‘The Right to Write.’ In it, I argued that all of us have the capacity to write. That it’s as normal to write as it is to speak.
I told my whole life story in my book.
If I read a book that impresses me, I have to take myself firmly by the hand, before I mix with other people; otherwise they would think my mind rather queer.
I need to add that my work on multiple intelligences received a huge boost in 1995 when Daniel Goleman published his book on emotional intelligence. I am often confused with Dan. Initially, though Dan and I are longtime friends, this confusion irritated me.
When I was eight, I would look at the cover of the ‘Ghost Rider’ comic book in my little home in Long Beach, California, and I couldn’t get my head around how something that scary could also be good. To me it was my first philosophical awakening – ‘How is this possible, this duality?’
I bought a book of Mark Twain quotes. That’s about my speed. I’ll read a couple quotes and put it down.
Software is becoming no different than a videotape or a record album or a paperback book, and not all of us are ready for that change.
Every time there’s a revolution, it comes from somebody reading a book about revolution. David Walker wrote a book and Nat Turner did his thing.
The comments I most appreciate come from ordinary readers who’ve happened on one of my books at some time of stress in their lives, and who actually credit the book with helping them through a bad time. It’s happened a few times in forty years.
The Antichrist is often identified with the second beast in the Book of Revelation that arises from the land, the beast that tries to make everyone worship the power of evil.
