I often keep my eyes open for bodies. I do. Ever since I was a kid. I think I read too many 'Nancy Drew' books.
My complaint is that there are more books and news articles than there are primary scientific papers. I am probably the biggest critic of the hypesters, because it's dangerous when fields get overhyped.
One day at my grandmother's house, I discovered 'The Secret Garden' and read it. This was the first book I found entirely for myself, and I cherished it.
There was going to be a spot for me in this joint, the earth, after all. It was never going to be a great match for someone as bright and strange as me, but books were going to make it survivable.
When a woman gets dressed up to go out at night, she wants to give 50% away, and hold the rest back. If you're an open book, there's no allure.
Plot is not my forte. It's like I have to live in my head in the book for a while before I figure out what the story is... My process is a bit messier.
I leapt eagerly into books. The characters’ lives were so much more interesting than the lonely heartbeat of my own.
I lay on the bed and lost myself in stories. I liked that. Books were safer than other people anyway.
Only five books tonight, Mommy," she says. No, Olivia, just one." How about four?" Two." Three." Oh, all right, three. But that's it!
I went away in my head, into a book. That was where I went whenever real life was too hard or too inflexible.
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.
There are some beautiful books out there. But the ones that leave me cold are the ones where I feel - it's that postmodern thing - it's more experimentation with language than it is a deep compassionate falling into another human being's experience.
Creation stories, so central in the religions of the Middle East, play a surprisingly marginal part in Greek myth. The Greeks had nothing to set alongside the resounding 'In the beginning' in the book of Genesis, where one eternal God creates the uni...
I'm around my kids every day. I'm regular. We're a regular family. My wife cooks, she washes clothes, I read books, I pump my own gas, I get my own hair cut.
I left drama school to do 'The Book Thief' - it was a real trip going straight from school kind of right into it, but I feel like the momentum of being in school put me in a good mindset as far as going into it as a learning experience.
I firmly believe that you can't get a good movie without risking a bad movie. A good adaptation of your book is worth it because it is such a wonderful experience to see your world translated onto the screen.
Just as movies, radio, and television evolved into new forms over time, the ebook will also become something more than just a way to read books. It will become its own specific and unique way of creating and sharing experience.
I try to create a challenge for myself in each book. And sometimes, believe me, I just kick myself afterwards, and say, 'Why on earth did you ever attempt this, you idiot!' But I'm always better for the experience.
Traveling to Europe and traveling in the U.S.A. was a much different experience. 'On the Road' exemplified everything glamorous that was happening on this side of the planet. The book puts off some kind of sweet melody - part hope for the world, part...
First of all there is always that artistic challenge of creating something. Or the particular experience to take slum life in that period and make something out of it in the form of a book. And then I felt some kind of responsibility to my family.
While I shared many of the same emotions Bill describes, in no way did my experience ever degenerate into the grimness I find in his book - I didn't have to live with Don, and I think that made a big big difference.
