Plot is tremendously important to me: I can't stand books where nothing happens, and I can't imagine ever writing a novel without at least one murder.
The first author I remember being obsessed by, actually realizing 'I like the way he writes and I like the way he tells stories,' was C.S. Lewis and the 'Narnia' books.
I want to be clear about this. If you wrote from experience, you'd get maybe one book, maybe three poems. Writers write from empathy.
I try to be upbeat. I read this book which tells you to write down everything that you're grateful for each day. Now I'm constantly noticing all the little things that make me joyful.
One of my main decisions when accepting the job of Children's Laureate was that I must continue working on picture books. If I don't write and illustrate for some time, then I begin to question who I am.
Reading a book is like re-writing it for yourself. You bring to a novel, anything you read, all your experience of the world. You bring your history and you read it in your own terms.
I enjoy it too much - even if I knew I'd never get a book published, I would still write. I enjoy the experience of getting thoughts and ideas and plots and characters organised into this narrative framework.
I write for the people I grew up with. I took extreme pains for my book to not be a native informant. Not: 'This is Dominican food. This is a Spanish word.' I trust my readers, even non-Spanish ones.
When I'm writing, I am lost in my book. Except family and close friends, I don't care about what critics, publishers or readers might think.
Judy couldn't move to Britain for family reasons, so I had to come to the States, and the U.S. government wouldn't give me a Green Card, so I airily told her I'd write a book.
I'm going to write a book, continue acting, continue motivational speaking and just share with people who I am and what I've learned in my second chance of life and pass it on to people in their first chance of life.
I know at my church a lot of the times we sung from hymn books and as we got older we started to change with time. I can honestly say that I was never influenced to write for the church.
After the war, when my husband came home, we had two more children, and domesticity for a while prevailed combined with beginning the work I had always wanted to do, which was writing a book.
I want to be an author/director and I'm writing my second book now and I want to make a movie of it, and I hope I get to do this for the rest of my life.
I considered that I had to write stories about the people I had met, with whom I'd worked, the history of my books - just in case I up and die.
Conspiracies fascinate me. When I visited the Rozabal shrine in Srinagar before writing my first book, I remember thinking that the person enshrined there was no ordinary mortal. History is rife with mysteries, and that visit ignited a fire to unveil...
I devour history books. I love anything by Thomas B. Costain or George MacDonald Fraser. He writes magnificent history, and he also wrote the Flashman stories, which are irresistible.
Often something comes in from which you can see that the person is good, the book may not be perfect as it is, and the person doesn't want to do a re-write. That's something we do almost nothing of.
At first, I spend about four hours a day writing. Toward the end of a book, I spend up to 16 hours a day on it, because all I want to do is make it good and get it done.
Oh yeah, I was one of the first guys writing comic books, I wrote Captain America, with guys like Stan Lee, who became famous later on with Marvel Comics.
My life's goal is not to write books; my life's goal is to know God better today. The neat thing about a goal like that is you can achieve it. Faith is constant; it's a relationship.
