The acquisition of a book signalled not just the potential acquisition of knowledge but also something like the property rights to a piece of ground: the knowledge became a visitable place.
My idea of rich is that you can buy every book you ever want without looking at the price and you're never around assholes. That's the two things to really fight for in life.
It wasn't until I started reading and found books they wouldn't let us read in school that I discovered you could be insane and happy and have a good life without being like everybody else.
The “Gospel” is not a sermon title or the name of a book in the Bible. The Gospel is the person of Jesus Christ and it is the power of God to bring people to salvation. Romans 1:16
For some, perhaps for many, books are spare time. For me, the rest of life is spare time: I wake and sleep language. It has always been so.
I keep an ongoing list of my fifty favorite books, which I recalibrate whenever I discover a new one that seems to demand a spot there.
I always favor the hero and heroine from whichever book I've completed most recently. Yes, I'm faithless and fickle!
Hands down, the biggest thrill is to get a letter from a kid saying, I loved your book. Will you write me another one?
The Carrie in the plot was too much like the Carrie in the book. She smoked, she swore a lot, she was very hard, very cynical. I could never have pulled it off.
The beginning of a book is always the hardest part for me. I'm a Chapter 3 kind of writer, which means I naturally start at Chapter 3.
When I'm going to see a comedian, I don't want to see them hold back, and when I'm reading a book, I don't want to hear an abridged version.
I lay no claim, it should be clear, to being a historian. So in my books, the intimate and personal have been intertwined inextricably with the broad and historical.
I can't say I wasn't warned. Alarms started clanging the day I signed to write 'His Way: The Unauthorized Biography of Frank Sinatra' (Bantam Books, 1986).
Maybe I'll open a bookstore," he smiled. "New and used books-- so everyone has a chance to see the world through the pages of a story.
I've only wanted paper and beautiful colors. It was my dream, and it still is my dream. And books. They're all I need, and the rest I can do without.
I've often described my book 'Anno Dracula' as 'literally, a vampire novel' - in that it battens on to other novels and sucks their lifeblood, transforming as well as feeding off them.
If you'd have told me five years ago that I'd have done all this - two books, some television and everything - I'd panic, I'd be scared.
I like to write about a lot of things, which is why my books are different. This is probably why I don't like to write sequels, but chiefly I like to write about people.
It's such a thrill when an adult comes up to me and says, 'I read your book as a child and really loved it.' That's a tremendous compliment.
When it comes to housework the one thing no book of household management can ever tell you is how to begin. Or maybe I mean why.
In the fairy tale the painting represents the here and now. The book is actually divided into five sections, through which the key character, the muse, leads us.
