A scholar is like a book written in a dead language. It is not every one that can read in it.
I first met the subject of X-ray diffraction of crystals in the pages of the book W. H. Bragg wrote for school children in 1925, 'Concerning the Nature of Things.'
In elementary school, I loved the 'Bailey School Kids' series. It was about a group of classmates who would speculate whether adults in their lives were supernatural beings. I read literally every single book in the series.
Science fiction writers aren't short of ideas. You can read a book, and it sets off a chain of thought processes, so it becomes a response to other people's books.
'A Rogue by Any Other Name' is the first book in the 'Rules of Scoundrels' series, centered on a legendary pre-Victorian casino and her four scandalous aristocratic owners.
I like vocabulary and I actually read a book called 'Word Freak,' which is about a guy who basically went into competitive Scrabble for a year. But having a big vocabulary and being good at Scrabble are not the same thing.
Writing my first book, I think in hindsight I went into it saying, 'It's gonna sell.' I was earning enough to scrape by sometime around a book or two before 'Tell No One.' I moved up from $50,000 to $75,000, then $150,000 for each book. I had never thought I would be doing anything else. I had enough encouragement.
I just thought it made sense to call a book 'Not Garbage,' even though the majority of it was going to be the scraps from people's studios; like newspaper clippings, weird drawings and stuff they might not necessarily show as artists.
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've always written a little bit. I mean, I've written screenplays, and I've doctored my dialogue for years, and I've written speeches - I was a speechwriter on 'The West Wing,' so I like that kind of thing. But I never really thought I'd write a book.
Up until my first book was published, I had all this potential, people would say, and I screwed up. After it, I could say: 'No, I didn't screw up.'
I normally keep a series of draft in a catalogue type of book in which I scribble, sketch and draw ideas.
When I know I'm going to work on a cover, I practically run to the computer! After working with words for so long, it's lovely to do something that's creative yet also the professional equivalent of scribbling in your own coloring book.
People think I must have been turning cartwheels on the night I sealed the movie deal - which was only two days after sealing the book deal - but I was really quite terrified.
I'm really a library man, or second-hand book man.
When I was in my teens, I was very, very keen on being the author of a book. What the book was was secondary. I wanted it to be in hardback. I didn't care how thick or thin it was, and I didn't actually care what it was about.
The main characters for 'The Seer and the Sword' made an appearance one night and then haunted me for over five years before I began to write them down. Does that count as inspiration? For me, characters tend to show up, stay on to help with the work of writing their stories, and then occasionally deign to visit after a book is finished.
Reading and life are not separate but symbiotic. And for this serious task of imaginative discovery and self-discovery, there is and remains one perfect symbol: the printed book.
I always find out after the fact that the books I've been writing were actually some sort of therapy, some sort of, you know, self-examination that I had to write the book in order to complete.
Anytime you're sitting there writing a book about yourself, it's a pretty self-fulfilling prophecy, I guess.
