No man should ever publish a book until he has first read it to a woman.
I have disassociated myself from that book.
As you go down the rabbit hole of reading into our history, you realize that there are so many things that history books didn't teach us about ourselves.
You can't really give away anything in your book ... should be exciting, it's my life, and I'm a cool and exciting guy.
My maternal grandmother - she was a compulsive reader. She had only been through five grades of elementary school, but she was a member of the municipal library, and she brought home two or three books a week for me. They could be dime novels or Balzac.
For many years I wanted to be a rock star but of course that didn't work out. I did however write on napkins and pieces of paper sentences and occurrences. I decided maybe I should write a book because I had been writing so much. I'm actually writing a book based on The Room that will hopefully be published soon.
If I read a book that cost me $20 and I get one good idea, I've gotten one of the greatest bargains of all time.
I read true crime books, and I read when people do case studies of stuff. I'm into books like that. Case studies or forensics or murder - all that good stuff.
If there are no books. There is no civilization.
There are rainy days in autumn and stormy days in winter when the rocking chair in front of the fire simply demands an accompanying book.
I started with the book Boardwalk Empire and then immersed myself in the history of Atlantic City, World War I, the temperance movement, Prohibition, pop culture. I even read the news and magazines of the period just to soak in it. That was before I even started thinking of the story.
I often like to think that our map of the world is wrong, that where we have centered physics, we should actually place literature as the central metaphor that we want to work out from. Because I think literature occupies the same relationship to life that life occupies to death. A book is life with one dimension pulled out of it. And life is something that lacks a dimension which death will give it. I imagine death to be a kind of release into the imagination in the sense that for characters in a book, what we experience is an unimaginable dimension of freedom.
I can remember being bullied and teased. It was absolutely horrible. I got kicked out of ninth grade for throwing a book at a girl who teased me. It was absolutely terrible.
If religion and life depend upon books or upon the existence of any prophet whatsoever, then perish all religion and books! Religion is in us. No books or teachers can do more than help us to find it, and even without them we can get all truth within. You have gratitude for books and teachers without bondage to them; and worship your Guru as God, but do not obey him blindly; love him all you will, but think for yourself. No blind belief can save you, work out your own salvation. Have only one idea of God - that He is an eternal help.
One of the stories I love is how Gutenberg’s printing press set off this interesting chain reaction, where all of a sudden people across Europe noticed for the first time that they were farsighted, and needed spectacles to read books (which they hadn’t really noticed before books became part of everyday life); which THEN created a market for lens makers, which then created pools of expertise in crafting lenses, which then led people to tinker with those lenses and invent the telescope and microscope, which then revolutionized science in countless ways.
I almost once wanted to publish a self help book saying, 'How To Be Happy, by Stephen Fry: Guaranteed Success'. And people buy this huge book and it's all blank pages, and the first page would just say, 'Stop feeling sorry for yourself--and you will be happy.'
Writing is a job, a craft, and you learn it by trying to write every day and by facing the page with humility and gall. And you have to love to read books, all kinds of books, good books. You are not looking for anything in particular; you are just letting stuff seep in.
My favorite book is the last one printed, which is always better than those that were published earlier.
I think any comic book - or really, any book that you can read - in a sense is an educational tool in that it helps literacy. The more you read, the better you get at it. It almost doesn't matter what you read, the important thing is for young people to become readers.
A multitude of books distracts the mind.
[the best advice about women] was from Robert Evans. The line was in his book, but he told me, "When it comes to a woman's mind, I know nothing."
For my Perfect Chemistry series, I did movie-style book trailers, and my fans went crazy for them.
What progress we are making. In the Middle Ages they would have burned me. Now they are content with burning my books.
A book is a souvenir of an idea.
The burning soul, the burden'd mind, In books alone companions find.
