It is a good rule after reading a new book, never to allow yourself another new one till you have read an old one in between.
Writing for children "compels you to throw all the force of the book into what was done and said. It checks what a kind, but discerning critic called 'the expository demon' in me.
There's a whole bunch of unfinished stuff. Then I've got books of lyrics. I find it frustrating to finish a song and not be able to record it... so I don't write a million songs.
When I was writing 'You Suck,' in 2006, I constructed the diction of the book's narrator, perky Goth girl Abby Normal, from what I read on Goth blog sites.
There's a lot of Sherlock love in here. In many ways, this book might as well be called 'Deduce THIS, Sexlock Holmes!' with a picture of me licking his meerschaum, cross-eyed and screaming.
I remember that already as a child I was often intensely interested in things, obsessed by ideas and projects in many areas, and in these topics I learned much on my own, reading books.
My personal theory is that younger audiences disdain books - not because those readers are dumber than past readers, but because today's reader is smarter.
What I'm always trying to do with every book is to recreate the effect of the stories we heard as children in front of campfires and fireplaces - the ghost stories that engaged us.
My first four books, from 'Fight Club' to 'Choke,' dealt with personal identity issues. The crises the narrators found themselves in were generated by themselves.
If I ever wrote a book on preaching, it would contain three words: Preach the Word. Get rid of all the other stuff that gets you sidetracked; preach the Word.
The Marvel universe is a deep, weird, woolly place, and getting to expose strange corners of it is part of the fun of 'She-Hulk.' Honestly, it's part of the fun of any Marvel book.
In some ways I think it would be very dignified if I went away for twenty years and then wrote my fourth book.
I can't stand Anne Tyler books, but I gobble them up. It's like Updike - I can't stand him either, but I read everything he writes.
That text-books be permitted in Catholic schools such as will not offend the religious views of the minority, and which from an educational standpoint shall be satisfactory to the advisory board.
I thought it was a glorious thing to be a critic and to be a literary editor, and one was really doing something that mattered: to keep up standards, to take books seriously.
Laughter and books and wine are holy things; and living is good; and death is a breathlessness with the whole adventure of finding everywhere the traces of one great beauty...
I don't read thrillers, romance or mystery, and I don't read self-help books because I don't believe in shortcuts and loopholes.
Loosers want it but only through the easy way. If action taking were like reading a story book, loosers would only love to open the picture pages
Once you can write an alphabet, you can write a book of 100 million pages. It's just a matter of believing it as possible, and taking the cross millimetre by millimetre.
I still have some of my old University essays, and I do still have my drawing book from primary year seven.
I don't really do themes. I might accidentally, but themes are an emergent phenomena of the writing of the book, of just trying to get a story out there.
