I don't understand this irony - valuable things like cars, gold, diamond are made up of hard materials but most valuable things like money, contracts and books are made up of soft paper.
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.
Take all that you can of this book upon reason, and the balance on faith, and you will live and die a happier man. (When a skeptic expressed surprise to see him reading a Bible)
A childhood without books – that would be no childhood. That would be like being shut out from the enchanted place where you can go and find the rarest kind of joy.
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 don't often reread my own books, unless I am going into another in the series and need to refresh my mood when originating the concept.
My bookshelves were groaning with WW2 books, Hitler's baleful eyes staring out at me from covers and spines for any new visitor (or passing burglar) to wonder if I might be a fan or at least mildly obsessed.
Like Petrach's, my books know infinitely more than I do, and I'm grateful that they even tolerate my presence. At times I feel that I abuse the privilege.
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'm not a gamer. I've never played any games. I was more a books and games outdoors kind of a person, so I was extremely daunted when I got this job knowing the size of the fan base and the commitment of the fans to 'Halo.'
It turned out that when my younger self thought of taking wing, she wanted only to let her spirit soar. Books are the plane, the train, and the road. They are the destination, and the journey. They are home.
Obsession led me to write. It's been that way with every book I've ever written. I become completely consumed by a theme, by characters, by a desire to meet a challenge.
You reach deep down and bring up what feels absolutely authentic to you as you move along with the book, but you don't know everything about it. You can't.
You have to be a lover of books without expecting more of them than they give - a little pleasure, a little insight, a moment of escape, a deepening of your own humanity. Not much else.
Make sure you meet the right people, people who know that industry and are willing to help you. Do your homework - read books about the industry, talk to people. If you don't know something, ask.
'The Hobbit' was one of the first biggish books I ever read. I remember vividly the 'riddles in the dark' passage, and it meant a lot to me to finally get to play it after all these years.
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.
Guys that preach verse-by-verse through books of the Bible - that is just cheating. It's cheating because that would be easy, first of all. That isn't how you grow people. No one in the Scripture modeled that.
Blake has always been a favorite, the lyrics, not so much the prophetic books, but I suppose Yeats influenced me more as a young poet, and the American, Robert Frost.
Every play I do, every book I write, every painting I paint, I will struggle with. I don't know what it's like for a project to come easy.
He turns the key. Presto! It opens this book of odd tales which transform the Brothers Grimm. Transform? As if an enlarged paper clip could be a piece of sculpture. (And it could.)
