You believe in a book that has talking animals, wizards, witches, demons, sticks turning into snakes, food falling from the sky, people walking on water, and all sorts of magical, absurd and primitive stories, and you say that we are the ones that ne...
The ideas I stand for are not mine. I borrowed them from Socrates. I swiped them from Chesterfield. I stole them from Jesus. And I put them in a book. If you don't like their rules, whose would you use?
How many people are watching a movie right now, or reading a book or listening to a song or looking into their life or dreaming with this profound, conscious or not, yearning more than anything for some kind of relationship somewhere with someone or ...
What I thought we ought to try to do in a book like this is to focus closely on Lincoln, himself, to see what he knew, how he knew it, how he came to make the decisions that he did, and how he implemented them.
If I had written the greatest book, composed the greatest symphony, painted the most beautiful painting or carved the most exquisite figure I could not have felt the more exalted creator than I did when they placed my child in my arms.
I'd like to emphasize that when a reader finishes a great novel, he will immediately begin looking for another. If someone loves your book, it increases the chance that he or she will look at mine. So there is no competition between writers. Another ...
If I were related to Monet, I don't know if I would be comfortable becoming an artist because it's too much, the comparison. If I wrote a book and put it out, the comparison to my great-grandfather, the comparison would be hilarious. Every critic, it...
The Christian Bible is a symbolic book, not a literal one. The one Christians know as Jesus was actually a symbol for the sun. Ancient sun worshippers believed the sun died at the end of the winter solstice and then three days later it would be rebor...
I look for two things when I am about to launch into a book. First, there has to be a dramatic arc to the story itself that will carry me, and the reader, from beginning to end. Second, the story has to weave through larger themes that can illuminate...
Of all the inanimate objects, of all men's creations, books are the nearest to us for they contain our very thoughts, our ambitions, our indignations, our illusions, our fidelity to the truth, and our persistent leanings to error. But most of all the...
It took me 11 years to struggle through one dumb book, and every day you just want to give up. But you don't find out you're an artist because you do something really well.
I actually really suck at naming books, so lots of years ago, readers were sending in their ideas for titles, and what we realized is that they were smarter than us. So we thought, Hey, go for it. So now we have a contest every year.
I go to bars and restaurants, and I sit and I eavesdrop on people and I watch people in shopping centers and, you know, I read the newspapers and I talk to the Trenton cops, and I just get a lot of information that comes in that somehow turns into a ...
I felt more doubtful than usual with 'Goon Squad,' because I knew that the book's genre wasn't easily named - Novel? Stories? Novel-in-stories? - and I worried that its lack of a clear category would count against it. My hopes for it were pretty mode...
When I was little, I wanted to be a doctor. I was really interested in gore. My grandfather was an orthopedic surgeon and he had a lot of books in his library that I would just pore over. A lot of them had really horrible pictures of deformities.
The Torah is the foundational text for Jewish law, but the Haggadah is our book of living memory. We are not merely telling a story here. We are being called to a radical act of empathy. Here we are, embarking on an ancient, perennial attempt to give...
I love books where I can't wait to turn every page, songs that grab me the first time I hear them, and films that make me totally forget about the craft because I am totally engaged in the story.
Funny how nobody talks on the tubes, isn't it? I rarely catch the tube myself, or lifts. Confined spaces, everybody shuts down. Why is that? Perhaps we think everybody on the tube is a potential psychopath or a drunk,so we close down and pretend to r...
You don't want to dwell on your enemies, you know. I basically feel so superior to my critics for the simple reason that they haven't done what I do. Most book reviewers haven't written 11 novels. Many of them haven't written one.
When I was a kid... if I couldn't get a ride to the comic book store, I would walk a mile and a half each way to get the latest issues of 'Batman' and 'Spider-Man' and 'X-Men.' I could not choose one over the other.
We tend to read each other's books in sizeable chunks as they are written. I don't know that you could say we are ruthless with each other - in fact, I suppose we are very kind. There are ways to make suggestions which are not destructive.
