Book

I am sure of this: that no one can write a book which children will like unless he write it for himself first.

Is 'The Wind in the Willows' a children's book? Is 'Alice in Wonderland?' Is 'Treasure Island?' These are masterpieces which we read with pleasure as children, but with how much more pleasure when we are grown-up.

The Old Testament is responsible for more atheism, agnosticism, disbelief - call it what you will - than any book ever written. It has emptied more churches than all the counter-attractions of cinema, motor-bicycle and golf course.

Chum was a British boy's weekly which, at the end of the year was bound into a single huge book, and the following Christmas parents bought it as Christmas presents for male children.

If you imagine writing 1,000 words a day, which most journalists do, that would be a very long book a year. I don't manage nearly that... but I have published slightly too much recently.

A surprising number of people - including many students of literature - will tell you they haven't really lived in a book since they were children. Sadly, being taught literature often destroys the life of the books.

Why do we take pleasure in gruesome death, neatly packaged as a puzzle to which we may find a satisfactory solution through clues - or if we are not clever enough, have it revealed by the all-powerful tale-teller at the end of the book? It is something to do with being reduced to, and comforted by, playing by the rules.

I read my first book on Woodrow Wilson at age 15, and I was hooked.

Before 'Giant,' I had only ever worked with Michael Greif, Michael John LaChiusa and Kate Baldwin in readings. It's really exciting to be blessed with the opportunity to work with so many I would put in the 'genius' book.

So I went in front of the judge, and I had my St. Jude prayer book in my pocket and my St. Jude medal. And I'm standing there and that judge said I was found guilty, so he sentenced me to what the law prescribed: one to 14 years.

I didn't follow the whole 'X-Men' story because it got too complicated. I'd pick up a comic book and have no idea what was going on.

My life has been the antithesis of that book 'The Secret'. I've always been interested in doing what I do. I love storytelling and I really enjoyed acting, but it never seemed like a realistic thing.

What if there was a library which held every book? Not every book on sale, or every important book, or even every book in English, but simply every book - a key part of our planet's cultural legacy.

'Until Friday Night' is the first book in my new young adult series, 'The Field Party.'

You should not do an autobiography if you want to tell the truth. There are a lot of things I know about people. If I can't say something good about a person, I don't want to say anything. And since I don't want to say anything bad, I won't write a book.

There is that lovely feeling of one reader telling another, 'You must read this.' I've always wanted to write a book like that, with the sense that you are contributing to the discourse in middle America, a discourse that begins at a book club in a living room, but then spreads. That is meaningful to me.

No, I had not read any other comedian's book. Not that I don't enjoy other comedians, I'm just not a reader.

Even as I was writing 'Empire State,' I knew there were more adventures for the main character, private detective Rad Bradley, to have. I also knew that the world was far larger than what I'd presented in book one.

The L.A Trilogy is a series of three novels starring Ray, a robot detective, and his boss, a computer called Googol. Set in an alternative version of 1960s Los Angeles, each book will be more or less standalone but together will form an overarching story arc with 'Brisk Money' as the origin story.

Another thing that's quite different in writing a book as a practicing newspaperman is that if you look at what you've written the next morning and you think you didn't get it quite right, you can fix it.

When I came back to Washington to be The Times' chief congressional correspondent in 1991, I was looking for a book subject, and Ted Kennedy stood out for two reasons.

A great comic-book cover occurs when it gets a potential reader to pick the book up and start thumbing through it. That's a comic cover's job: Attract someone's attention, and persuade them to try the issue out.

Imagine a world in which no writer has written a literary novel in sixty years. Imagine a place where not a single person has read a book that is truly about the character at its center.

I'm trying to convey to my audience that you really can't judge a book by its cover, and there's more to the universe than you can see with your eyes.

It's hilarious to me that by writing an obscene fake children's book I am mistaken for a parenting expert.

I've planned book tours for myself, whether or not anybody wants to hear what I have to say. I've weighed in on things like what the cover looks like, what the copy looks like, how it's going to be promoted - just every aspect of it.

You can be precious about something like 'Blair Witch' and say, 'How dare you approach it as a sequel or remake' or whatever, but its legacy was so tarnished by 'Book of Shadows' that someone had to come in and do something in the spirit of the original.

I am a book reviewer. I write for a glossy magazine called 'SCI FI.' The money is not life-changing, but it's a low-stress gig. Publishers send me their books. More than I could possibly read. I pick a few and write about them, put a very few others on the shelf, to be perused at my leisure, someday.

What I think is interesting is that the more you do, you have to invent a book of rules of what you can do and what you can't do. And the very real danger is that if your book of rules becomes a book of cliches.

'The Man in the High Castle' was not the first alternative history novel, nor even the first Nazis-win-the-war novel, but it is still probably the most influential book in the genre.

When a locked-room mystery doesn't work, the solution makes you groan, and the book gets hurled across the room.

My earnestness at the injustices I witnessed when I was writing 'Random Family' may have been my gravest reportorial offense during the early years of reporting. When I discuss the book with students, they often ask me how I could 'stand by' in the face of so much suffering, the egregiousness wasn't my powerlessness but my surprise.

'Drawn & Quarterly' has always given me complete editorial control over my books and comics, so any decision about what to include or exclude from the book was my own.

I don't pick up my work at all. If it's something that's still in progress and I have the chance to make some edits on the material or think about the order, little things like that, I'll keep those stories at hand and go through them. But once it exists as the book, it's locked away in a vault, and I kind of put it behind me.

I've always liked the tradition of publishing work serially in the comic-book 'pamphlet' format and then collecting that work in book form, so I've just stuck with it.

I've always published a range of responses to my work in the letters section of my comic book.

Book clubs are the best thing that has happened to the world of publishing.

I find writing a book a slow, intricate process, a kind of obstacle course punctuated with great rewards. But research is always thrilling, and I tend to incorporate newfound material up to the very last minute.

When I had my first gig, I was 18 in January in 2007. My first gig that I got paid, I was playing for 10 people in a 250 people capacity venue. The promoter wanted to book me because he liked my music. I played a couple of songs that made people dance. To me, that rush has always stayed the same.

The best time to plan a book is while you're doing the dishes.

I've always wanted to have a book published - it was a dream of mine, but the thought of actually writing a book made me feel really sick.

When we had to do book reports, I would pick a book that no one read and just make it up and turn that in. I got praised for my imagination.

Fame, money and the size of the market are not very important to me. What is, is writing a book that is worth doing and then publishing it. I don't write books for entertainment, for people to pass the time then throw away.

I've learned that you really cannot judge a book by its cover.

For me, even in my first book, the pleasures of writing anything magical is that it has to be physical. It has to be grounded and very much in this world. Then, I get to play with all the consequences of this new thing.

One thing I don't want to feel is marketplace pressure, so I'm really glad I enjoy teaching because I can rely on that for a salary. I think it would be such a different game if I had to write a book that has to sell well.

'Family Life' is a blueprint of my life. It was horrible and physically gruesome in a way the book doesn't attempt to capture. It was emotionally very bleak.

I had written a book. For various reasons, the publishing industry had decided that my book was going to be 'important.' The novel had taken me 12-and-a-half years to write, and after being with the book for so long, I had no real perspective on the merits or demerits of what I had written. I hoped it was good, but feared that it wasn't.

I mean to say, this is the book and I really loathe it and I can't imagine what a nice Jewish boy like me ever, how I ever got into this dreadful trade.

And I think that being able to make people laugh and write a book that's funny makes the information go down a lot easier and it makes it a lot more fun to read, easier to understand, and often stronger. So there's all kinds of advantages to it.

I'm crushed by the responsibility of writing a satirical book.

There's no comparison between NPR and the propaganda that you hear from Rush or from Sean Hannity, the news movement conservatives that are just laying out, slathering out the disinformation and the lies, as I discuss in my book, 'Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them: A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right.'

Pitches are like pages of a book, they're so important. The chess game, how I set you up early, and how I'll do it differently later.

For me, whether it's in a book or on T.V., a recipe has to be simple. I have a short attention span, so to open a cookbook and see a recipe that goes on for three to four pages, well, I've lost interest.

I have to admit that I am really partial to the look and feel of a book. I have been that way my entire life. I like the weight, look, and feel of a book. I enjoy turning the pages, and frequently scan the spines of my many books on the wall, each title a reminder of the stored information and creative thoughts contained therein.

I like the weight, look, and feel of a book. I enjoy turning the pages, and frequently scan the spines of my many books on the wall, each title a reminder of the stored information and creative thoughts contained therein.

Anyone who was tempted to draw comparisons between my father's 'Dave Robicheaux' series and my first book quickly gave up.

Television viewing has become for me a completely different experience, because I don't watch shows on a weekly basis. I wait until the DVD or I TiVo everything and wait until the end of a season and watch it all over a weekend. For me that's a really satisfying experience, like reading a book.

You can't always go by the book, even in comedy.

Definition of a classic: a book everyone is assumed to have read and often thinks they have.

I had thought for years, probably 30 or 40 years, that it would be a lot of fun to try my hand at a classic English mystery novel... I love that form very much because the reader is so familiar with all of the types of characters that are in there that they already identify with the book.

Former Dublin newsman Paul Lynch made his debut as a novelist a few years ago with a book called 'Red Sky in Morning,' set in mid-19th century County Donegal, where a rage-driven farmer has committed a murder with devastating results.

I wish - I wish instead of just recommending these books, I could set them down at your doorstep. The collected stories of John Updike, the second volume of T.C. Boyle's collected stories, and Stanley Crouch's book about the rise and times of our genius saxophone player Charlie Parker. These are deep books, books that you can get lost in.

In one book, CACHALOT, just for my own amusement, every character is based directly on someone I have known.

I've thought of publishing a book of my hate mail, but I don't own the rights to the letters.

A book must have moral purpose to be any good. Why, I don't know.

I wrote three mysteries and then a contemporary spy novel that was unbelievably derivative - completely based on 'The Conversation,' the movie with Gene Hackman. Amazingly, the character in the book looks exactly like... Gene Hackman.

It takes me three months of research and nine months of work to produce a book. When I start writing, I do two pages a day, if I'm gonna do 320, that's 160 days.

What I discovered is I don't like to repeat lead characters because one of the most pleasurable things in a book to me is learning about the lead.

When I read period material - and it ain't on Google - I am always alert for that one incredible detail. I'll read a whole book and get three words out of it, but they'll be three really good words.

I learnt that I must never finish a book with nothing else to do.

My attitude is that if anybody of any age wants to read a book, let them, but I do think that no child would want to read 'Boneland.'

The ability to absorb a book and make someone else's words and story your own was exactly was I was doing on stage.

I knew Bobby Dylan back in the days when he lived in the village. He used to come and see me and sing songs for me, saying they ought to go into my next collected book on American folk music.

It may be true that the only reason the comic book industry now exists is for this purpose, to create characters for movies, board games and other types of merchandise.

The best book on programming for the layman is 'Alice in Wonderland', but that's because it's the best book on anything for the layman.

Actors are agents of change. A film, a piece of theater, a piece of music, or a book can make a difference. It can change the world.

I didn't really grow up a comic book fanatic.

I resisted writing a book for a long time because I didn't want to invade anyone else's privacy or hurt anyone or anger anyone.

One of the commitments I made to myself when I decided to write a book was to be brutally honest, particularly about myself.

At some point, I would like to write a book and other things, but I work best when there is some sort of deadline in my own mind, but not when fifty people or fifty million people are breathing down the back of my neck.

I can't not put humor in a book.

I wrote this book, '2030,' and I was careful in the book not to overdo the future because I don't think it comes that fast.

I think the last book I cried in was Patti Smith's 'Just Kids.' I don't shy away from crying, though. I actually really enjoy being moved like that.

I've always wanted to see what Egypt was like when they were building the pyramids or Rome at the height of the empire or Greece - more specifically, Crete before it was destroyed. Why? Because I'm curious how we all hung out on a day to day basis, what was the chit chat, etc. Reading things in a book never gives you the feel.

I got a call on a Sunday. 'Do you want to do 'The Godfather?' I thought they were kidding me, right? I said, 'Yes, of course, I love that book' - which I had never read.

A writer stops writing the moment he or she puts the last full stop to their text, and at that point the book is in limbo and doesn't come to life until the reader picks it up and the reader flips the pages.

I always knew that I wanted to live with books, even as a child, because we traveled a lot. Home was the book to which I came back every evening.

I had a library of maybe 1,000 books in my room in Buenos Aires. I did have the sense that everything there was organised in the right way. You'll probably think I needed serious psychiatric treatment, but there were times when I would not buy a book because I knew it wouldn't fit one of the categories into which I had divided the library.

I remember, as a child, the confusion of not knowing what this place was where I was supposed to spend the night: it's a disquieting experience for a child. And what I would do was quickly unpack my books and go back to a book I knew well and make sure the same text and the same illustrations were there.

A bad book is as much of a labor to write as a good one, it comes as sincerely from the author's soul.

To me a book is a message from the gods to mankind, or, if not, should never be published at all.

It's not the same thing to make a work - a film, a book, a play - about youth as it is to make one about old age.

To me there's no difference between a book of stories and a novel - they're just slightly different shapes.

The trouble with calling a book a novel, well, it's not like I'm writing the same book all the time, but there is a continuity of my interests, so when I start writing a book, if I call it 'a novel,' it separates it from other books.

You are always working on your worst book and your best book at the same time. The praise does not make you write better, and it shouldn't make you write worse, either.

'Looking For Alaska' by John Green is a very great book. I feel like every teenage girl says John Green's 'Fault In Our Stars,' but 'Looking For Alaska' is better.

While not my personal favorite of the Disney princess films, 'The Little Mermaid' wins hands-down in my book for best Disney adaptation. Little girls waited for more than 150 years for Hans Christian Andersen's 'The Little Mermaid' to have a happy ending. Walt Disney finally gave it to her.

The thing is when you play a character it's the persona you bring across from a book to film, or book to script to film. If I play Frank Sinatra, there's gonna be things I do in a movie that Frank might not have done, but it's the personality that comes across.

My friends found out that I was writing a book on Twitter. It didn't seem worth mentioning over dinner. They're all so successful themselves.

Writing a book is not a crime.

I think that writing texts, publishing texts, selling texts in a physical book store is one of the important tools for breeding this new generation.

When a woman gets dressed up to go out at night, she wants to give 50% away, and hold the rest back. If you're an open book, there's no allure.

A book suggests a whole world and story that I could have never thought of in a million years.

You need to be naive enough to do things differently. No big publishing house would have allowed us to co-create a fully designed, four color business book in landscape format - because it was contrary to the publishing industry logic. However, we thought of Business Model Generation as a product, not just a book - similar to Apple products.

I love 'House of Cards.' I would watch Kevin Spacey read the phone book.

I am becoming increasingly difficult to please as a reader, but I adore being surprised by a really wonderful book, written by someone I've never heard of before.

There's a point at which writing a book, or a long article, begins to feel like mental labor, and it's too painful to connect in the world in any real way mid-process. The only way to survive is to write until it is all said and done.

I've been reading this little book. It's called the Russian constitution. And it says that the only source of power in Russia is the people. So I don't want to hear those who say we're appealing to the authorities. Who's the power here?

For 'The Lobster Kings,' I listened to a lot of Johnny Cash. And it makes its way into the book.

I had not expected to ever be in a position to able to say, 'Hey, see the magazine with J. Lo on the cover? They reviewed my book inside.'

To map the Governor General's Award is to map both the past and the future of Canadian literature, and to be nominated for my first book is wonderful.

I have no regrets because I did everything by the book.

We went to Ibiza, and I was on Ritalin, and, for a kid who couldn't concentrate, I read a 200-page book on King Arthur, and my mum just hated it. She said it just wasn't me.

The paperback is very interesting but I find it will never replace the hardcover book - it makes a very poor doorstop.

A good argument, like a good dialogue, is always a proof of life, but I'd much rather go and read a book.

All we need to do, reader or writer, from first line to final page, is be as open as a book, and be alive to the life in language - on all its levels.

We'd never expect to understand a piece of music on one listen, but we tend to believe we've read a book after reading it just once.

Every time I finish a book, I forget everything I learned writing it - the information just disappears out of my head.

I did go there later, but I hadn't been there before I wrote the book. Sometimes I feel like the imagined can feel more real than the real?

I never plot out my novels in terms of the tone of the book. Hopefully, once a story is begun it reveals itself.

What a sense of superiority it gives one to escape reading some book which everyone else is reading.

Some readers sort of suspect that you have another book that you didn't publish that has even more information in it. I think that readers sort of want to be taught something. They have this idea that there's a takeaway from a novel rather than just the being there, which I think is the great, great pleasure of reading.

'Lives' is one of those books I should really have written when I was younger. It is the classic childhood, adolescence, breakthrough-into-maturity book. Every beginning writer has that material - and after that, you're not sure what you can do.

I read just endlessly, ceaselessly, almost every book, it seems!

Deliver me from writers who say the way they live doesn't matter. I'm not sure a bad person can write a good book, If art doesn't make us better, then what on earth is it for.

I start each book when it's ready and never before.

I started writing as a child. But I didn't think of myself actually writing until I was in college. And I had gone to Africa as a sophomore or something - no, maybe junior - and wrote a book of poems. And that was my beginning. I published that book.

I used to do calligraphy, and I'm afraid that has lapsed, but I've always been interested in book printing.

But mostly, it's a book about my relationship with my father.

Writing this book feels like a completely different activity from writing my comic strip because it's about real life. I feel like I'm using a part of my brain that's been dormant until now.

'Britain's Royal Families' became my first published book, in 1989, from The Bodley Head, and the rest of the story is - dare I say it? - history!

I wrote each book in thirty-five days flat - just to get the darned thing finished.

'The Practical Heart' was published one week before the World Trade towers collapsed. Book reviewing and all else in our culture stopped dead-still for half a year. I went on the book tour anyway. But I felt like the apostle Paul going unto the catacombs where scared believers hid and prayed.

Writing books that people want to read is helpful - my most successful book is my only police procedural, a very popular subgenre of the very popular crime fiction genre.

You know, I've never been a comic book person, just because that's not my gig and I don't have a television.

I've put on makeup just for fun since I was a really little girl. Now I keep a look book for inspiration - with hair, makeup, beauty tips and products to try.

For the longest time, I was auditioning, getting called back, and I had a long string of things not going my way. I thought, 'Maybe this is never going happen. Maybe I'll never book a commercial.'

My first book is really about heat. That book, for me, was an exploration of heat as ingredient. Why we don't talk about heat as an ingredient, I don't quite understand, because it is the common ingredient to all cooking processes.

'Flaubert's Parrot' is an amphibious book in which what appears to be a personal essay about Flaubertian writing is gradually, delicately transformed into an extremely sad novel in which the differences between character, author, and narrator are less clear than they appear at first glance.

I don't think that books are wondrous, magical things that come from nowhere. It's important that a book has clues about where and how it was written.

Writing is so fun precisely because if you take out the right adjective, the readers can decide what kind of book is in their hands. Suspension of disbelief should not be mandatory in contemporary writing.

I have a screened in porch, and it's nice to curl up with a book outside when it's raining, especially an old battered classic like 'Pride & Prejudice & Zombies.'

I priced my books at what I would want to spend on an electronic book.

I usually plan to read a book for a half-hour before bed, but then I end up staying awake until 3 A.M. to finish it. Fortunately, my dog doesn't mind when I keep the bedside lamp on.

The book is called 'A House in the Sky' because during the very, very darkest times, that was how I survived. I had to find a safe place to go in my mind where there was no violence being done to my body and where I could reflect on the life I had lived and the life that I still wanted to live.

The Bible is a history book.

I wanted to create a heroine that was flawed. I wanted her to be a real person. She's selfish, she's childish, she's immature and because I'm doing a three-book arc I really played that up in the first book. I wanted the reader to be annoyed with her at times.

Throw out the rule book. If you like wearing navy and black together, wear it, if you like mixing up gold and silver jewellery, mix it. If you like it, wear it - don't care about what anyone else thinks.

Erudition - dust shaken out of a book into an empty skull.

The covers of this book are too far apart.

Honestly, I get character ideas from the most inane places. Sometimes a song will give me an idea. Sometimes I will just hear a snippet of conversation that ends up having nothing to do with the book that emerges.

I have swung on a flying trapeze, explored a glacier, and been hit in the face by a shark's tail while scuba diving. I like to throw myself fully into projects and adventures, which is probably how I managed to publish a book in the first place.

One of the strangest results of having your name on a book jacket is the proliferation of people who know one narrow aspect of your life and are suddenly surprised to learn there's more.

Luckily I haven't fallen into the trap, which has claimed so many writers, of living from day to day thinking 'Ah, I'll write a book about that.'

I consider myself lucky that Sonu Nigam, Bikram Ghosh and Taufiq Quereshi came forward to create an original soundtrack to promote my book, something that hasn't been tried here before!

I'm one of those lucky guys making a living out of something I really enjoy doing. That's a blessing. But you never know. What if my subsequent book series flops? I don't come from a wealthy background, so I'd be left with no choice. I'd have to go back into banking!

When I'm writing, I am lost in my book. Except family and close friends, I don't care about what critics, publishers or readers might think.

I am not in the least eloquent or fluent with languages. My writing on social media is quite pedestrian. But even if it was near any acceptability, I would not be in a position to pen a script or a book.

That is a good book which is opened with expectation, and closed with delight and profit.

I sit down and draw from my lyric book. I sit down and start looking through it and see if there is anything that strikes me that I've written.

I read a book a day when I was a kid. My family was not literary, we did not have any books in the house.

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 favorite anything is always relative to the context of present time, place and mood. When I finish a book and want to immediately find another by the same author and no other, that author is elevated to my favorite.

You write a book and you hope somebody will go out and pay $24.95 for what you've just said. I think books were my salvation. Books saved me from being miserable.

Yeah, I'm an open book.

I'm concerned about a lot of serious border issues. This book is about the border reality and the struggles of the undocumented worker.

There is not one big cosmic meaning for all, there is only the meaning we each give to our life, an individual meaning, an individual plot, like an individual novel, a book for each person.

The more I like a book, the more slowly I read. this spontaneous talking back to a book is one of the things that makes reading so valuable.

I want this book to be facts, to be important, to be history.

For a professional writer in the Soviet Union, it works this way. First, you have to have something to say - that's the main thing. Second, it's a matter of who publishes you. If your book has real stuff in it, readers will ferret it out, even in a Siberian journal.

I was really surprised at the success of 'House of Sand and Fog,' because it is so awfully dark. Believe it or not, when writing it, I never had the word 'tragedy' in my head - I wasn't trying to write a dark book at all.

Writers have to be careful not to confuse personal attention with the attention that's going towards the book.

An art book is a museum without walls.

When I'm sniffing around new territory, I often choose, rather randomly, one general book and then follow its bibliography and notes to other, more specialized works and to the primary source material.

I'm supposed to say, Bill O'Reilly, that's immoral - click - and then walk back in and book his A block the next day and have a fine day and everything be kosher? I don't think so.

I think a conceptual idea comes to me first - something I've been mulling over a lot right before I feel like writing a book - and then the characters start to develop around it.

Irvine, being a planned community, is really good shorthand, especially in a movie or book, for understanding suburban pressures.

Mrs. Palin has neither pushed for creationism in Alaska schools nor moved to ban a single book in Wasilla.

The sad fact is that actual artistic oppression - book banning in its many modern forms - is a matter of course in the entertainment industry, especially when the underlying product is declared politically incorrect or runs contrary to the interests of Hollywood's political altar, the Democratic Party.

The highest praise is when a kid says, 'This book feels so real, this could have happened at my school.'

I read books all the time. I'm just half looking for something to do, I mostly just read for pleasure. Occasionally I stumble across something that could be a movie, but I don't put a book down just because I don't see a movie in it, either.

'Blind Curve,' the book I'm working on now, sprang from a crazy incident that happened to me last year while on my book tour. I was pulled out of my car for a minor traffic violation - an incident that escalated into my being thrown into cuffs and told I was going to jail. Except in my story, the hero doesn't get off as easily as I did.

I'm all about entertaining and keeping a reader on the edge of their seat, so to me, the social issues have to be meaningful and give the book what's really 'at stake,' but ultimately it's not about them - it's always a personal story of everyday people thrust into life-threatening situations and having to perform heroic acts.

One novel that I think is an overriding influence in my life is 'All the King's Men,' the most beautiful book written in the U.S.

A good-humored wife who appreciates most, if not all, of my humor - her price is far above rubies, as the book of Proverbs doesn't quite say.

As an actor, you generally don't get to choose what projects you are part of, so I've been very fortunate that 'The Book of Mormon' was something I got to be part of. I don't want to be lofty, but it was groundbreaking, in many ways, for musical theater, so that was really thrilling to be part of.

One of the advantages of the book's having been out there for more than a quarter century is that there's been time for people to report back on what it's done for them.

I am a big book collector. I love books.

When I do a project, I like the idea that someone is going to experience the book, someone is going to experience the film, someone else is going to experience a framed photo on a wall, but they are all going to get to the same root thing as long as all of those mediums are exploring it from the same place.

The book is called 'Most Talkative,' because I was voted most talkative in high school. And I've never stopped talking. My mouth has been my greatest asset and my biggest Achilles' heel.

As an old reporter, we have a few secrets, and the first thing is we try the phone book.

In the same way 'Lord of the Rings' was an interpretation of the book, 'The Hobbit' is being treated the same way. It will be faithfully represented with a fresh interpretation.

People think, 'Oh, well how can 'The Hobbit,' which is one book, become three films?' But you can take one line from an appendice and it turns into a whole sequence.

My first book was so horrible I have deleted all copies of it. Thankfully, it was before the Internet, so there are no lurking caches of it anywhere.

You've got to live life to write a book about it.

I think the book struck me in a few ways that I thought very interesting to pick it as my first martial arts film. It has a very strong female character and it was very abundant in classic Chinese textures.

What adults don't always understand is that to a kid, a comic book is like a movie. My Marvel comics took my imagination to other places - other galaxies.

A book is simply the container of an idea like a bottle, what is inside the book is what matters.

I don't have the time to curl up on my couch with a good book.