I didn't read the book on how to be a well-adjusted celebrity.
Never have a picture of a well-adjusted African on the cover of your book, or in it, unless that African has won the Nobel prize.
Every well-written book is a light for me. When you write, you use other writers and their books as guides in the wilderness.
When I put magic into a book - whether it's a wizard or a crusty old werewolf - I'm asking a reader to swallow a huge leap that is counter to everything he or she knows. An extra big helping of reality makes that leap go down a lot easier.
I remember going into a bookshop, and the only book I saw with a black child on the cover was 'A Thief in the Village' by James Berry, and I thought, 'Is this still the state of publishing?' Then I thought, 'Either I can whine about it or try to do something about it.'
When I read it, I don't wince, which is all I ever ask for a book I write.
He that composes himself is wiser than he that composes a book.
I woke up one day and thought: 'I want to write a book about the history of my body.' I could justify talking about my mother because it was in her body that my body began.
I read my first book on Woodrow Wilson at age 15, and I was hooked.
Virginia Woolf's great novel, 'Mrs. Dalloway,' is the first great book I ever read. I read it almost by accident when I was in high school, when I was 15 years old.
'Simon' was always a word-of-mouth book. When it came out in 2015, I don't know that anybody thought that 'Simon' could be mainstream. Publisher Harper Collins loved it in-house, but it wasn't a lead title. Nobody is more surprised than me that it's a film. It's the little book that could.
We learned in the university to consider Wordsworth and Keats as Romantics. They were only a generation apart, but Wordsworth didn't even read Keats's book when he gave him a copy.
There are two methods for the literary study of any book - the first being the study of its thought and emotion; the second only that of its workmanship. A student of literature should study some of the Bible from both points of view.
I was always taught that book keeping was more relevant than book reading. The only thing worth reading was meant to be a balance sheet.
Then you start another book and suddenly the galley proofs of the last one come in and you have to wrench your attention away from what you're writing and try to remember what you were thinking when you wrote the previous one.
The success of 'The Widow' meant there were expectations for the second book from the first word, and it has created a completely different writing experience. Not to say I haven't enjoyed writing 'The Child,' but I confess there were times when I felt as if I was wrenching it out of my body with bloodied fingernails!
We did not have a television while I was growing up, and so I read voraciously. My earliest memory of being utterly transfixed by a book was Madeleine L'Engle's 'A Wrinkle in Time.'
I didn't look at the previous 'A Wrinkle in Time' movie. I wrote ideas down from the book, but I didn't really want to copy that Meg. We're the same, but we're different at the same time. I wanted to make myself Meg. I didn't want to use somebody else or use a reference.
One of my favorite stories growing up was 'A Wrinkle in Time'. I loved that book.
An author writes a book, and that's the book at that point. And if the author writes the book again, then somehow something has gone wrong, if you see what I mean.
