Read. Read. Read. Just don't read one type of book. Read different books by various authors so that you develop different style.
If one reads enough books one has a fighting chance. Or better, one's chances of survival increase with each book one reads.
As a children’s minister, I always believed that I was an evangelist, and at the end of the book, there’s a simple prayer that, whoever’s reading the book could accept Jesus as their Lord and Savior
In the early 1980s, I wrote a book called 'The Complete Guide to Financial Privacy.' If I would write that book today, it would be a pamphlet. There is precious little privacy left.
The way a book is read, which is to say, the qualities a reader brings to a book can have as much to do with its worth as anything the author puts into it.
I was a little nervous backstage. But I had this book, Gandhi. I just read his quotes, closed my eyes and focused my thoughts. Presently, this book is my prized possession.
'Out' was my real breakthrough, the novel that became a hit in Japan and sold a lot of books, so it was sort of an obvious choice for being the first book to be translated into English.
Well, if I am not vulgar, neither is my book. I wrote myself. Suggestiveness is always vulgar. But truth never. My book is not even remotely suggestive. I call things by their names. That is all.
The experience of reading a book is always unique. I believe that you render a version of the story, when you read a book, in a way that is unique and special to each person who reads it.
Business book writing for me is when some set of ideas gets stuck in my mind, I write a book about it. I haven't got a theory and I haven't got a framework.
You'll notice that my books offer great variety. Some are for adults, some for children and some for teens. There are mysteries, historical novels, picture books, love stories and stories of crisis and courage.
There's only one test of a great children's book, or a great children's film, and that is this: If it can be read or viewed with pleasure by adults, then it has the chance to be a great children's film, or a great children's book.
I began illustrating children's books because of a growing disillusionment with the sort of work I was doing in the advertising industry. Book publishing offered me the chance to be far more creative.
I've written a lot of really good books. Now we'll see if I can write any more good books. I mean there's a chance I won't, but I'm going to try.
However, I survived and started to read all chemistry books that I could get a hand on, first some 19th century books from our home library that did not provide much reliable information, and then I emptied the rather extensive city library.
On two or three book tours, I have visited bookstores in the Mall of America and signed copies of my books and introduced myself to store employees who I hope will sell them.
With each new book, the march of our national history takes a step forward. When one is present at a book launch, one is bearing witness to the birth of a new body of ideas, to the coming into being of another testimony of history.
Writing 'Native Guard,' I didn't know I was working on a single book. I began writing that book because I was interested in the lesser-known history of these black soldiers stationed off the coast of my hometown.
I'm kind of surprised that so many of those other books were almost exactly like mine. They even follow the form. There were some books that even copied the stamp. It shows so little imagination.
The Book of Revelation is the strangest book in the Bible, and the most controversial. Instead of stories and moral teaching, it offers only visions - dreams and nightmares, the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, earthquakes, plagues and war.
Screenplays I didn't really care about, journalism, travel books, getting my writer friends to write about their dreams or something. I just determined to write the books I had to write.
