When you read about a car crash in which two or three youngsters are killed, do you pause to dwell on the amount of love and treasure and patience parents poured into bodies no longer suitable for open caskets?
I don't want to be in my car all day. I love getting up in the morning in Venice and walking my dogs down to the cafe to get my tea, and then perhaps going to a bookstore and sitting and reading, then walking to the beach.
Have you read 'The Grapes of Wrath?' That was my family. My dad was a sharecropper in western Oklahoma. When the dust storms came and everything got wiped out, they came to California. The guys with the mattresses on the tops of their cars in the mov...
Every year, I give my dad an advance copy of my latest book. He reads it over the next several nights and says something incredibly supportive. Then he clears his throat nervously and changes the subject.
My mum is bright, ambitious, well read, political and very bolshie: when my dad was conscripted into the Army and posted to Libya, she convinced some general to let her go with him. I don't know how she managed it.
My dad had an eighth grade education, and everything that he did in his life was just stuff that he went out and did - figured out what he needed to know and read. Very successful, a union contractor.
You want a story? Read 'Gone With the Wind'. These aren't stories. They're joke books. The whole thing of a beginning, a middle and an end has been done to death.
We never stop reading, although every book comes to an end, just as we never stop living, although death is certain.
Not that I want the current president killed. I will, for the record and for the FBI agent assigned to read this and make sure I mean no harm, clearly state that while I am obsessed with death, I am against it.
It is a horrible fact that we can read in the daily paper, without interrupting our breakfast, numerical reckonings of death and destruction that ought to break our hearts or scare us out of our wits.
What really disconcerts commentators, I suspect, is that when they read historical fiction, they feel their own lack of education may be exposed; they panic, because they don't know which bits are true.
Children without access to quality early education programs start kindergarten with an 18-month disadvantage, and that gap continues to widen. By the time they are in fourth grade, many cannot do math or read at grade level.
People who don't read seem to me mysterious. I don't know how they think or learn about other people. Novels are a very important part of our education.
Good education means learning to read, write and most importantly learn how to learn so that you can be whatever you want to be when you grow up.
Do you know the difference between education and experience? Education is when you read the fine print; experience is what you get when you don't.
And really, the basis, I think, of achieving some success in what I want to do today comes from my mother's push to get me to read and to make something of myself from the standpoint of an education.
As the true object of education is not to render the pupil the mere copy of his preceptor, it is rather to be rejoiced in, than lamented, that various reading should lead him into new trains of thinking.
The more that learn to read the less learn how to make a living. That's one thing about a little education. It spoils you for actual work. The more you know the more you think somebody owes you a living.
I loved to read, but I always thought that the dream was too far away. The person who had written the book was a god, it wasn't a person.
When God saved me, He gave me a thirst to learn and to read and to study. I thrived in college. I got a bachelor's degree in philosophy and then went to Reformed Theological Seminary in Orlando.
I read science, because to me, that's extremely exciting. It's like a great detective story, and it's happening right in front of us.
