I think that, in all of my time, I got just one fan letter, from an NFL fullback named Darian Barnes. NFL players might not have enough time for my books.
I read a zombie story, and I have nightmares for days. But my youngest sister loves zombie stories. So when she insisted it was time for Bards and Sages to put together a zombie book, I couldn't tell her 'no.'
Don't patronize the chain bookstores. Every time I see some author scheduled to read and sign his books at a chain bookstore, I feel like telling him he's stabbing the independent bookstores in the back.
Because kids are physically smaller, there's an assumption by people who haven't read a kids' book for a long time that their ideas and themes and problems and ambitions must be commensurately smaller and less important. I would venture that sometime...
With reading, I was very lucky. I had a mother who read to me, not because she had time - she was a busy woman - but she found 10 minutes to come and sit on my bed with a book.
There's a time and place for the Kindle, and I own one now and have books on it that I don't otherwise have. But I don't find that my hand reaches out for it the way it does for a trade paperback, or (in the middle of the night) for the iPod Touch.
I have two books that were published quite some time ago. I start to read about three sentences. I have to close it. I am so self-conscious. Who did I think I was?
Successive generations of middle-class parents used to foist their own favourite books on their children. But some time in the late Eighties it began to wane - not because children had lost interest in adorable animals but because most of it was avai...
I do most of my reading on the train ride to and from work. But I always have a book in my handbag so that I can read at any time, anywhere.
I have no problem selling books to media franchises and we do it all the time. The author must understand that he/she is a writer for hire and has no control over copyright or over editorial changes made to the text.
That was the - It was an exciting time because it was as though I was sort of tied up in a paper bag or in a gunny sack with a rope around the neck of it, and all of a sudden with the acceptance of that first book everything sort of spilled out!
So, while I gave up the notions of publishing at that time, I never stopped editing and refining that book. A few years later, in 1987, I thought I had it ready to go out again.
Any time you read a book and get attached to the characters, to me it's always a shock when it goes from page to screen and it's not exactly what was in my head or what I was imagining it should be.
While reading 'David Copperfield' in the middle of the night - probably because of the light, I had insomnia for the first time - I looked out of the window and thought, 'If this is what books can do, this is what I want to do.'
I take time with each person and try to remember them, especially if they're a repeater from another event. I know a lot of authors just sign a book and keep their heads down, but I'm not like that.
The reason I was successful in launching my first book with bloggers is this: I assumed that I should spend as much time on a blogger with a million-person readership as I would pitching an editor of a publication with a million person subscription-b...
If I am on a journey where I only have time to read one-and-a-half books, I never know which one-and-a-half I'll feel like reading. So I bring eight.
I always market research my books before I hand them in by showing them to five or six close friends who I trust to be honest with me, so they are very heavily re-written already.
[last lines] Céline: Bauby, 43, a renowned journalist, family man and free spirit, was planning a book about female revenge.
Clementine: You don't tell me things, Joel. I'm an open book. I tell you everything, every damn, embarrassing thing.
[to Indiana, while watching a Nazi parade and book burning] Professor Henry Jones: My son, we're pilgrims in an unholy land.
