I read one book where the characters never said anything; instead, they spent all their time grunting and bleating and hissing and cooing and growling and chirping and... It was like a menagerie in there. After a while, I wasn't even taking in the rest of the book, because that was all I could see: the dialogue tags.
It's a very good historical book about history.
When 'Midnight's Children' came out, people in the West tended to respond to the fantasy elements in the novel, to praise it in those terms. In India, people read it like a history book.
Take a newspaper account of Waterloo or Trafalgar, with all the small advertisements: it seems much more real than reading about it in a history book.
The Bible is a history book.
Growing up as an Asian American, we're lucky to have two sentences in a history book about the Chinese-American experience.
Actually it's a gift as an actor to cover such different parts of history. It's like time travelling, being inside a history book, in the actual locations.
I think 'The Lord of the Rings' holds perhaps a deeper place in people's hearts than 'The Hobbit' the book does.
To make three films out of one shortish book, they have to turn it into an epic, just as 'Lord of the Rings' is an epic. But 'The Hobbit' isn't an epic: its tone is intimate and personal, and although it's full of adventures and excitement, they're on a different scale to those of the bigger book.
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.
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.
I live hour by hour, day by day. I can't even plan a holiday. I go on holiday, like, the day after I book it.
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.
From an early age, I had the idea that writing was truth-telling. It's on the record. Everybody can see it. Maybe it goes back to the sacred origins of literature - the holy book. There's nothing holy about it for me, but it should be serious, and it should be totally transparent.
We came to say, the Quran is our constitution, we are committed to God and his holy book. God willing, should they try to carry out their crime against the Quran, God will tear their state apart and they will become God's lesson to anyone who tries to desecrate the holy book.
The holy book is implanted in the hearts and minds of all the Muslims. Humiliation of the holy book represents the humiliation of our people.
Many Muslims may not seek to kill the infidel, but they don't want to condemn those carrying out the holy book command.
I do not recall a Jewish home without a book on the table.
When one starts writing a book, especially a novel, even the humblest person in the world hopes to become Homer.
I read five books on the Constitution. My favorite was 'Plain, Honest Men' by Richard Beeman. I went on a science jag in the same way. I kept getting in arguments about evolution and being bested. So I read Charles Darwin's 'On the Origin of the Species,' a fantastic book that is not that difficult.
