I like extravagance. Letters which give the postman a stiff back to carry, books which overflow from their covers, sexuality which bursts the thermometers.
Television and cinema were all very well, but these stories happened to other people. The stories I found in books happened inside my head. I was, in some way, there. It's the magic of fiction: you take the words and you build them into worlds.
Morality's not practical. Morality's a gesture. A complicated gesture learnt from books.
I find it fascinating that a lot of business books that do well are from people who've never made any money in business.
. . . books possess an ounce-of-weight to minute-of-entertainment ratio that compares quite favorably to intoxicants.
Now my only income is a few royalty cheques from my books.
People without curiosity are like houses without books: there's something unsettling about them.
Thus Mr. Lawrence, Mr. Douglas and Mr. Joyce partly spoil their books for women readers by their display of self-conscious virility; and Mr. Hemingway, but much less violently, follows suit.
A novelist who writes nothing for 10 years finds his reputation rising. Because I keep on producing books they say there must be something wrong with this fellow.
Our passions shape our books, repose writes them in the intervals.
This is one of the defining sorrows of books: that we cannot see one another.
For Christians, the first of books is the Gospel and the Rosary is actually the abridgement of the Gospel.
[On libraries] What's great about them is that anybody can go into them and find a book and borrow it free of charge and read it. They don't have to steal it from a bookshop. . . You know when you're young, you're growing up, they're almost sexually exciting places because books are powerhouses of knowledge, and therefore they're kind of slightly dark and dangerous. You see books that kind of make you go 'Oh!'
There is no substitute for books in the life of a child.
My goal is to teach readers how to treat and respect themselves and each other in an entertaining way. I do that in all of my books.
I always wanted to be a designer. I read books on fashion from the age of 12.
I've been to a lot of school and read a lot of thick books, but at my very core there's a made-for-TV-movie mentality I don't think i will ever shake.
The danger is to stupidly believe that depicting facts gives us much insight. If facts were the only thing that counted, the telephone directory would be the book of books.
When you become published and become a reviewer, piles of books come along and you are pushed by fashion and what you are commissioned to do.
It's just different discipline, just doing the voice over. I guess I've done about 5 or 6 audio books in the past and I do the animated voice for a show called Fatherhood on Nickelodeon.