I read the Steve Jobs book, and that kind of changed everything. I've been, like, an Apple geek my whole life and have always seen him as a hero. But reading the book, and learning about how he built the company, and maintaining that corporate cultur...
I don't like books that seem to want to teach me things. Which is not to say that one doesn't learn from books - but you do your own learning in your own way.
I find inspiration in many places. Sometimes music gives me the kernel of a story. Sometimes it's dissatisfaction with the plot of a movie or a book that gets me thinking. Sometimes it's love of a movie or book.
I was a book lover from the beginning. I loved, love, words and images and ideas, the ways a book can make you feel things deeply or help you understand something you never even knew there were words for.
I love old books. They tell you stories about their use. You can see where the fingerprints touched the pages as they held the book open. You can see how long they lingered on each page by the finger stains.
I read the 'Harry Potter' books as I was writing my own books, and I love them, but I don't think Harry was very much like I was as a kid. He's always brave, and he's perfect in a lot of ways.
'Out of Africa,' Dinesen's second book, is a love story, though not the one portrayed by Streep and Redford in the film. The memoir is about Dinesen's love of East Africa - the cultures, the landscapes, the animals. The feeling that saturates the boo...
The one test I have for every completed book is if I feel head over heels in love with the hero. If he hasn't stolen my heart from the previous hero, I know the book isn't right.
There is a difference between a book of two hundred pages from the very beginning, and a book of two hundred pages which is the result of an original eight hundred pages. The six hundred are there. Only you don't see them.
It had been startling and disappointing to me to find out that story books had been written by people, that books were not natural wonders, coming of themselves like grass.
It had been startling and disappointing to me to find out that story books had been written by people, that books were not natural wonders, coming up of themselves like grass.
People wonder why the novel is the most popular form of literature; people wonder why it is read more than books of science or books of metaphysics. The reason is very simple; it is merely that the novel is more true than they are.
I grew up in a house full of books, and we belonged to the Country Lending Service - each month the State Library would send us a parcel of books by train.
Well, I don't know. It's long, it's longer than both of the other books put together, so it's more ambitious. I think I get under the skin of the people a lot more than in the other books.
Those of us who are blamed when old for reading childish books were blamed when children for reading books too old for us. No reader worth his salt trots along in obedience to a time-table.
Every good book should be entertaining. A good book will be more; it must not be less. Entertainment…is like a qualifying examination. If a fiction can’t provide that, we may be excused from inquiring into its higher qualities.
We didn't have much, but I was raised to believe if you had books, you had a lot. My grandfather and my parents made me and my twin brother Kiel read at least a book a week.
Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people who never knew each other, citizens of distant epochs. Books break the shackles of time. A book is proof that humans are capable of magic.
I think that any writer who is commercial, who sells a lot of books, has to face criticism. Because the more hermetic and the more difficult your book is, supposedly it's better.
As long as a film stays unmade, the book is entirely yours, it belongs to the writer. As soon as you make it into a film, suddenly more people see it than have ever read the book.
When I'm writing a book, I prefer not to speak about it, because only when the book is finished can I try to understand what I've really done and to compare my intentions with the result.
