Every day I run into people who don't know what I do. And even after I explain it they still don't know what I do. So now I can just say, 'Pick up the Locas book!' And that tells them all.
The thing that probably trips me up the most are people getting tattoos of stuff that I've designed in my books. That always spins me out in a weird way. It seems like such a permanent commitment to something I've done. I don't know that I could do t...
Tree It is foolish to let a young redwood grow next to a house. Even in this one lifetime, you will have to choose. That great calm being, this clutter of soup pots and books-- Already the first branch-tips brush at the window. Softly, calmly, immens...
'Diary of a Wimpy Kid' is my first book, and it's the fulfillment of a life-long dream. I had always wanted to be a cartoonist, but I found that it was very tough to break into the world of newspaper syndication. So I started playing with a style tha...
I feel lucky I didn't become that newspaper cartoonist I wanted to be because in the U.S. so many newspapers have suffered circulation declines, and some have folded. What's fun about being an author is I reach a much bigger audience, and there is so...
Many of Judy Blume's books - which I devoured when I was growing up and where I found characters that were believable because they were a lot like me - caused considerable consternation when they were first published, but now they're widely accepted ...
I'm always conscious when I'm writing a story that the women in my books need to save themselves. They don't need to be scooped up into a man's arms and carried off into the sunset. But I also can't stand when writers feature a really strong female c...
King Louie: [singing] Now, I'm the king of the swingers, whoa / The jungle V.I.P. / I've reached the top and had to stop / And that's what's botherin' me / I wanna be a man, Man Cub / And stroll right into town / And be just like the other men / I'm ...
[Shere Khan is calmly stalking a deer just as Colonel Hathi and the other elephants frighten off his would-be prey with their noise] Elephants: Hut, two, three, four. Hut, two, three, four. Shere Khan: What beastly luck! Confound that ridiculous Colo...
Ordell Robbie: Now that there is the Tec-9, a crappy spray gun from South Miami. This gun is advertised as the most popular gun in American crime. Do you believe that shit? It actually says that in the little book that comes with it: the most popular...
Mr. Lachance: Why can't you have friends like Denny's? Gordie: Dad, they're okay. Mr. Lachance: Sure they are. A thief and two feebs. Gordie: Chris isn't a thief. Mr. Lachance: [Raises his eyebrow] He stole the milk money at school. He's a thief in m...
Adam: You've read our book? Lydia: Yeah. Adam: You can follow it? Lydia: Yeah. Why were you guys creeping around in Delia's bedroom? Adam: We were trying to scare your mother. Lydia: Stepmother. Anyway, you can't scare her. She's sleeping with Prince...
I feel like every time I start up, it's like a truck you have to get into 15th gear, so you very solely crank into that mental space where you feel really immersed in the world of the book and then you can just kind of go. But there's just that few d...
At the time I was writing 'Weedflower,' my friend Naomi Hirahara was writing a book about Japanese-American flower farmers. She knew quite a few elderly farmers and put me in touch with four or five of them who had been in camps during WWII. Some, li...
I think a lot of people saw 'Fight Club' and thought, 'Right, here's our next Che Guevara, here's our next Fidel Castro, here's someone who's going to wave the flag.' And I was like, 'No, it's just a book. And if I beat that drum, if I play that song...
After I wrote my memoir, 'A Long Way Gone,' I was a bit exhausted. I didn't want to write another memoir; I felt that it might not be sane for one to speak about himself for many, many, many years in a row. At the same time, I felt the story of 'Radi...
People book me because of the songs I write, not because of the sets that I play, per se... I'm sure I'm going to be moving to a laptop really soon, but I was one of the last guys to let the vinyl go. I was crying. In my room, I still have thousands ...
Half of my library are old books because I like seeing how people thought about their world at their time. So that I don't get bigheaded about something we just discovered and I can be humble about where we might go next. Because you can see who got ...
Each time I write a new piece, whether a novel, a picture book, a speech or anything, really, it has so much to do with what I'm going through personally or a problem I'm trying to work out. When I wrote my novel 'Baby,' my three children had all jus...
The nice thing about a series is you can end on cliffhangers all the time. You can be like, 'You know what? Here we go, this person just died, end of book.' And with the end of the series, you're very conscious of all the plotlines that were left han...
Back when I was 16, when I should have been doing normal high school things, I availed myself of my brand new driver's license to spend as much time as possible in Milwaukee's Renaissance Book Shop, a tumbledown five-story warehouse that the city was...
