I fantasize about having a manual job where I can come home at night, read a book and not feel responsible for what will happen the next day.
My parents were wonderful people, but there were terrible rows between them, and at times I found the atmosphere at home unbearable. The Arthur Ransome books gave me an alternative childhood and the tools to escape.
Canada was for me very much Sweden, you know? Very much open people, that they read books, they go see films. I felt at home in Canada. And also, you speak French.
I was home schooled in high school but was definitely the nerd in middle school. I was in three academic clubs, a huge book worm, and the teacher's pet. I was kind of an easy target for bullies.
I obtained a job at the Library of Congress. I loved books, so I felt at home. I was going to end up, I thought, majoring in English and teach at the college level.
My maternal grandmother - she was a compulsive reader. She had only been through five grades of elementary school, but she was a member of the municipal library, and she brought home two or three books a week for me. They could be dime novels or Balz...
Many adults that I have met in my time believed that picture books are 'babyish'. I hope I have changed minds on this, as I set out to do.
I want to inspire through example. I hope my books motivate others to open doors and windows that will help them to embrace their own truth, light and joy.
I hope that readers will tear through my books because they can't stop themselves - and then, maybe, read them again and find new things there.
I am proud, and more than a little excited, to be asked to work with Faber in an editorial capacity. It is my dearest hope that we will produce some fantastic books together.
All of my books, which are supposedly, I mean they're called YA novels, my hope is that adults would find no reason not to read them if they read them.
Sending a book out into the world is a lot like sending your child to the first day of kindergarten. You hope the other kids play nice and that she makes friends.
I'm never, I hope, stupid enough to believe that Twitter or blogging or any of this stuff is a substitute for actually doing the work or writing a book.
I get asked to read new works a lot, in the hope that I will give a quotation and I will only give a 'puff' for a book I truly love.
I said in my acceptance speech that I hope that readers remember this not as the year I won the Booker, but the year that there were six extraordinary books on the shortlist.
My hope is that I hit it big with something, and then I'll have enough of a cushion to carve out time to write a book. That would be my passion project.
Today, if you want to access a typical out-of-print book, you have only one choice - fly to one of a handful of leading libraries in the country and hope to find it in the stacks.
Theological writing is usually done in essays or books, but I hope to show that if we concentrate on sentences, we may well learn something we might otherwise miss.
What I mean by that is that the point of life, as I see it, is not to write books or scale mountains or sail oceans, but to achieve happiness, and preferably an unselfish happiness.
My books are shelved in different places, depending on the bookstore. Sometimes they can be found in the Mystery section, sometimes in the Humor department, and occasionally even in the Literature aisle, which is somewhat astounding.
I like to deal with EVERY aspect of our condition, and that means terror and humor in equal mix. Some books have more room for humor than others.
