Mr. Lachance: Why can't you have friends like Denny's? Gordie: Dad, they're okay. Mr. Lachance: Sure they are. A thief and two feebs. Gordie: Chris isn't a thief. Mr. Lachance: [Raises his eyebrow] He stole the milk money at school. He's a thief in m...
Adam: You've read our book? Lydia: Yeah. Adam: You can follow it? Lydia: Yeah. Why were you guys creeping around in Delia's bedroom? Adam: We were trying to scare your mother. Lydia: Stepmother. Anyway, you can't scare her. She's sleeping with Prince...
I feel like every time I start up, it's like a truck you have to get into 15th gear, so you very solely crank into that mental space where you feel really immersed in the world of the book and then you can just kind of go. But there's just that few d...
At the time I was writing 'Weedflower,' my friend Naomi Hirahara was writing a book about Japanese-American flower farmers. She knew quite a few elderly farmers and put me in touch with four or five of them who had been in camps during WWII. Some, li...
I think a lot of people saw 'Fight Club' and thought, 'Right, here's our next Che Guevara, here's our next Fidel Castro, here's someone who's going to wave the flag.' And I was like, 'No, it's just a book. And if I beat that drum, if I play that song...
After I wrote my memoir, 'A Long Way Gone,' I was a bit exhausted. I didn't want to write another memoir; I felt that it might not be sane for one to speak about himself for many, many, many years in a row. At the same time, I felt the story of 'Radi...
People book me because of the songs I write, not because of the sets that I play, per se... I'm sure I'm going to be moving to a laptop really soon, but I was one of the last guys to let the vinyl go. I was crying. In my room, I still have thousands ...
Half of my library are old books because I like seeing how people thought about their world at their time. So that I don't get bigheaded about something we just discovered and I can be humble about where we might go next. Because you can see who got ...
The nice thing about a series is you can end on cliffhangers all the time. You can be like, 'You know what? Here we go, this person just died, end of book.' And with the end of the series, you're very conscious of all the plotlines that were left han...
Back when I was 16, when I should have been doing normal high school things, I availed myself of my brand new driver's license to spend as much time as possible in Milwaukee's Renaissance Book Shop, a tumbledown five-story warehouse that the city was...
Because I spend so much time traveling, I tend to do most of my reading on the same iPad on which I write. For me, it's words, not paper, that matter most in the end. This practice has had the additional benefit of greatly reducing the time I spend s...
I have hidden my race for 22 books. I have hidden behind my married name, which is very Caucasian, because I didn't feel safe coming out with it. I didn't feel that the market would really accept me. I think I felt it's time to start bringing in an A...
Proust writes, he remembers, physically. He depends on his body to give him the information that will bring him to the past. His book is called 'In Search of Lost Time,' and he does it through the senses. He does it through smell. He does it through ...
Jupiter Sharts: [praying aloud] Tommorrow we goes into battle, so Lordy, let me fight with the rifle in one hand, and the Good Book in the other. So that if I may die at the muzzle of the rifle... die on water, or on land, I may know that you blessed...
Title card: There was a land of cavaliers and cotton fields called the old south. Here in this pretty world gallantry took its last bow. Here was the last ever to be seen of knights and their ladies fair. Of master and of slave. Look for it only in b...
Captain Ramius: Ryan, sit here. Jack Ryan: I'm not a Naval officer! I'm with the CIA! Captain Ramius: CIA? Jack Ryan: I'm not an agent, I just write books for the CIA! Captain Ramius: Whatever. Sit here and do exactly what I tell you.
Kitty: Oh, you're reading a book? Laura Brown: Yeah. Kitty: What's this one about? Laura Brown: Oh, it's about this woman who's incredibly - well, she's a hostess and she's incredibly confident and she's going to give a party. And, maybe because she'...
Hanna Schmitz: Do you have a book? Michael: Yes, I have. I took one with me this morning. Hanna Schmitz: What is it? Michael: The Odyssey by Homer. It's my homework. Hanna Schmitz: We're changing the order we do things. Read to me first, kid. Then we...
For me, wearing a tie is a pleasure, a recherche one but a pleasure nonetheless. You could say that I'm avoiding tie avoidance. My own gorgeous collection runs into hundreds and I buy them the way I buy books - I simply can't pass a shop. I have love...
We're taught Lord Acton's axiom: all power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely. I believed that when I started these books, but I don't believe it's always true any more. Power doesn't always corrupt. Power can cleanse. What I believe is alw...
The one author who has influenced my writing the most is the English writer John Fowles, who wrote 'The French Lieutenant's Woman,' 'The Magus,' 'The Collector,' and other novels. None of his books is like any other. He continually challenges himself...
