Today we read books 'extensively,' often without sustained focus, and with rare exceptions we read each book only once. We value quantity of reading over quality of reading. We have no choice, if we want to keep up with the broader culture.
There is a lot of talk in publishing these days that we need to become more like the Internet: We need to make books for short attention spans with bells and whistles - books, in short, that are as much like 'Angry Birds' as possible. But I think tha...
I once made a check of all books in my fourth-grade classroom. Of the slightly more than six hundred books, almost one quarter had been published prior to the bombing of Hiroshima; 60 percent were either ten years old or older.
As long as you have any floor space at all, you have room for books! Just make two stacks of books the same height, place them three or four feet apart, lay a board across them, and repeat. Viola! Bookshelves!
[first lines] Narrator: One small fact: you are going to die. Despite every effort, no one lives forever. Sorry to be such a spoiler. My advice is when the time comes, don't panic. It doesn't seem to help.
Narrator: [Narrator/Death] It's always been the same. The excitement and rush to war. I met so many young men over the years who have thought they were running at their enemy, when the truth was, they were running to me.
Rudy Steiner: Are you coming? Liesel Meminger: Where are you going to? Rudy Steiner: Isn't it obvious? I'm running away. Liesel Meminger: Have you thought this through? Rudy Steiner: Ya. I don't want to die. There - all thought through.
[from trailer] Liesel Meminger: My name is Liesel Meminger. I don't have a family. Or even a place to call home. I never understood the meaning of the word Hope. But I'm about to meet the people who will change all that.
Liesel Meminger: [about Jewish neighbor] I don't understand. What did he do so wrong? Max Vandenburg: He reminded people of their humanity. Liesel Meminger: Can't he apologize? Max Vandenburg: To who? Hitler?
When a book comes from the publisher and you see it for the first time... Of course it's not remotely like seeing a baby for the first time, but I can remember with each book what room I was in when I opened it. That would be excitement, though, I th...
I teach classes 28 weeks of the year, but the rest of the time I do research and write books. While I'm writing a book, which I probably do two out of every three years, it's like having a second job. I squeeze in the hours when I can.
Kids just don't read any more. They spend much more time with video games. It's just hard to get kids to read anything. Book sales have dropped dramatically, too. I think 90% of the books are bought only by 5% of the US population.
At a time when there's younger writers starting up and it's inevitable that you're becoming less fashionable, at a time when the industrial pressures apply more and more to books, how do you keep a book you wrote 28 years ago selling well year on yea...
Suzanne Collins, it was such a big thing for me to make the handshake with her and to say, 'You can trust me. I will not screw up your books. And I won't let them be diluted and softened. And I won't let them be exploited and made guilty of the sins ...
I write so that people will read what I write. I don't want to write a book that a thousand people read, or just privileged people read. I want to write a book whose emotional truth people can understand. For me, that's what it's about.
Clementine: You're not a stalker, or anything, right? Joel: I'm not a stalker. YOU'RE the one that talked to me, remember? Clementine: That is the oldest trick in the stalker book. Joel: Really? There's a stalker book? Great, I gotta read that one.
Tevye: As the good book says, when a poor man eats a chicken, one of them is sick. Mendel: Where does the book say that? Tevye: Well, it doesn't say that exactly, but somewhere there is something about a chicken.
People ask me, 'Why are you still writing books?' Like I'm still only writing to make money and as soon as I have enough I'll quit and go fishing? I like to write books. It's the most satisfying thing I do.
I was a huge comic book fan as a kid. The only problem I had with comic books is how expensive they got. I didn't have a lot of money, so I had to be very specific about what I wanted to collect. I think they're all somewhere in the basement of my fo...
As a very small boy, my passion was nature, and I had pets - cats, a dog and a bunny rabbit - and I wrote a very small book called 'My Pets,' filled with their photographs and a discussion about my pets and how much I loved them... That was my first ...
There are those who believe that the value of a children's book can be measured only in terms of the moral lessons it tries to impose or the perfect role models it offers. Personally, I happen to think that a book is of extraordinary value if it give...
