When I was 9 or 10 years old it wasn't the thing to be seen doing - reading a book in your spare time.
Deep down, the young are lonelier than the old.' I read that in a book somewhere and it's stuck in my head. Maybe it's true. Maybe it's not true. More likely, the young and the old are lonely in different ways, in their own ways...
Where nothing in a person's earlier years lends itself to an old age devoted to continuing intellectual and physical pursuits, a late-life interest in Tolstoy or even crossword puzzles is unlikely to appear, no matter the urging by well-intentioned s...
My judgement is not good when I am on a book tour. I am not thinking about it that much. What happens is I will go back home. I have a 4-year-old and a 1-year-old and a wife who is now taking care of them who is wondering where her husband is.
[A] couple I had known - who were old friends - asked me what I was going to work on next. I told them I wanted to write a near future book about AIDS concentration camps. They were vehement in their response: they thought it was a terrible idea. The...
I was lost in a magical mystic world as I step into the old university library. This place I would say is the birth place of the ‘writer’ in me and still one of my most loved places in the world. It was always peaceful there. Each and every momen...
Where books had been a comfort before, they became a necessity, old books best of all: thick heavy tomes with stories that spread and twisted through other worlds, where he could walk like a ghost in the footsteps of other lives.
If you tell an eight-year-old she has a talent for something, she'll never give it a rest.
Cats are meowable gloves you don’t wear, you pet to keep your hands warm. But I keep my hands warm the old-fashioned way—by applauding all the political rhetoric coming out of Washington DC.
My plan to live from 65 to forever is to simply keep showing up. I also don’t want to retire at the same age as a road’s speed limit—unless that speed limit is 35. Live slow, die old.
A tree once saved my life. A posse was going to hang me, but this wise old oak would not let them. As a token of my gratitude to that tree, I used it for furniture instead of firewood.
He told me he had a wife and daughter, and then he showed me a picture of an 8-year-old girl, to which I said, “Don’t you think she’s a bit too young to be a wife and mother?” Fucking pedophiles.
When he sees my pain, the old and new, he pushes me to give it to him. To give in to his need to consume all of it and make it his.
It is lovely to meet an old person whose face is deeply lined, a face that has been deeply inhabited, to look in the eyes and find light there.
I read numerous books - loads in fact - and, as I always do when recording a historical project, immersed myself into the subject matter. I spent many hours at Henry's old homes, such as Hampton Court, and visiting the Tower of London. I read no othe...
Every age has its own outlook. It is specially good at seeing certain truths and specially liable to make certain mistakes. We all, therefore, need the books that will correct the characteristic mistake of our own period. And that means the old books...
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.
'Holes' was my favorite book ever. So you know when you love a book and you hear it's being made into a movie and it makes you a little annoyed at first? But I would've loved to play the Shia LaBeouf role in that movie when I was younger. I just want...
My books are inert as cordwood till a reader's imagination ignites one and an old flame jumps to life.
Young or old, a writer sends a book into the world, not himself.
As an old reporter, we have a few secrets, and the first thing is we try the phone book.
