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I grew up around books. When I first held the book and it was a substantive, tangible thing, and I thought of all the work that went into it, not just my work but everybody else's and the research and so forth, there's a sense of really have done something worthwhile.
Tom Fort, a BBC radio journalist, starts from the assumption that 'many of us have a road that reaches back into our past'. For him, this is the 92 miles of the A303 - as he subtitles his book, the 'Highway to the Sun'.
When 'Watchmen' was published in 1986, the vast majority of comics readers deemed it a watershed in comics history. The 12-part serial comic book was widely acclaimed as a genius subversion of the superhero genre, and it did much to popularize comics to adults.
I haven't yet written a book in a far-future utopia, where all bad things are eliminated, but it would be fun to do that one day and introduce some subversion.
There's something deeply satisfying when it succeeds, but I'm not going to do another book just to put my name on something and make some money if it's not something I deeply care about.
Take your time, however long the book needs. I've seen a lot of promising careers go into decline because writers succumbed to the pressure to write faster than was comfortable for them or the story.
I don't think there is such a thing as a bad book for children.
Everybody has a right to like or dislike anything or anyone. From a flower to a flavor to a book or a composition but it is very sad that in our country we actually fight over such things in an unseemly manner.
I did a book signing when we were in New York the day before yesterday. A lady came through and she was just weeping, and said, 'I wish this would have been brought out sooner, my sister is in prison for suffocating her child.'
I do wish that reviews were less like book reports. There was an era when reviewers had something to say about a book: when they painted context and drew conclusions. Many reviews these days are little more than plot summary.
At age 77, I need the help of someone with more energy than I can now summon to finish a book.
Most adults, unlike most children, understand the difference between a book that will hold them spellbound for a rainy Sunday afternoon and a book that will put them in touch with a part of themselves they didn't even know existed.
Well, there's nothing better than putting your feet up on a Sunday afternoon and grabbing a good book.
The publishing of a book is a worldwide event. The attempt to suppress a book is a worldwide event.
There's a moment in every book when the book turns and it surprises me.
I wrote books to entertain. I'm not trying to teach anything! If I suspected the author was trying to show me how to be a better behaved girl, I shut the book.
What that book does for me is give me the tools in the same way that I had the tools when I learned the regular scales or the alphabet. If you give me the tools, the syntax, and the grammar, it still doesn't tell me how to write Ulysses.
It appears a bold thing to say so when one sees how much many a modern author who knows how to make a skilful use of the Book of Chronicles has to tell about the tabernacle.
Frazzled and delirious, as I've just finished a new book of stories. I feel like Moses staggering down the mountainside with the tablets of stone.
