Maybe we all need to leave our children with a value legacy, and not a financial one. A value for things with a personal touch - an autographed book, a soul-searching letter.
Winning doesn't mean my book is better than anyone else's. It means I'm very fortunate. And I should be very, very aware of that. And grateful.
I've received two key pieces of advice in regard to my books. The first is, "You should lay off the f-bombs." The other is, "You should add more f-bombs.
Find someone who has a life that you want and figure out how they got it. Read books, pick your role models wisely. Find out what they did and do it.
One of these days some simple soul will pick up the book of God, read it, and believe it. Then the rest of us will be embarrassed.
The most accomplished way of using books is to serve them as some people do lords; learn their titles and then brag of their acquaintance.
I like terrific writing, but I also like a terrific story. My favorite books have both, and they're by contemporary, commercial American writers.
But there are certain books I would never put on a Kindle because you want to be able to look at graphs and photos or the footnotes and maps. You can't see that.
It's - I write the books and let the market find who reads it. I guess a young adult is anywhere from ten to fifteen.
Grinning is something you do when you are entertained in some way, such as reading a good book or watching someone you don't care for spill orange soda all over themselves.
I used to think, 'I'm going to write.' I knew that from quite early on, but I also thought, 'Maybe I'll be an explorer or a spy,' and it all came from books.
To some people, the fact that I am not married, or don't have children, would be the reason I have written a book on punctuation.
I have been writing for 50 years and readers still read my first book from when I was in the Marine Corps.
And that is the problem with a society that doesn't read books. The most painful form of censorship does not come from a centralized, repressive government. It is a cast, black cloak of a nation's indifference.
Old books exert a strange fascination for me -- their smell, their feel, their history; wondering who might have owned them, how they lived, what they felt.
Present-day Spain translates as many books into Spanish, annually, as the Arab world has translated into Arabic in the past 1,100 years.
It's so tedious writing cookbooks or writing the recipes because I've never been much of a measurer. But to write a book, you have to measure everything.
If you never ask yourself any questions about the meaning of a passage, you cannot expect the book to give you any insight you do not already possess.
I've always been a fan of books that create an interesting blend of fact and fiction - whether it's Norman Mailer, or 'The Short Timers,' or 'In Cold Blood.' I'm a fan of that genre.
I do, indeed, close my door at times and surrender myself to a book, but only because I can open the door again and see a human face looking at me.
I actually wrote my first zombie book way before I got the job on 'Saturday Night Live.'
