Good books are for consideration after, too.
Books and movies are like apples and oranges. They both are fruit, but taste completely different.
The death of the music business was insane, but audio recordings have been around now for maybe 120 years. Books have been around for, what, nine centuries? So they’re more entrenched than music.
Until we see each other again, keep your head together, read some good books, be useful, be happy.
People think that I must be a very strange person. This is not correct. I have the heart of a small boy. It is in a glass jar on my desk.
Speaking personally, you can have my gun, but you’ll take my book when you pry my cold, dead fingers off of the binding.
If I have to spend time in purgatory before going to one place or the other, I guess I’ll be all right as long as there’s a lending library.
I’m a slow reader, but I usually get through seventy or eighty books a year, most fiction. I don’t read in order to study the craft; I read because I like to read.
Fantasy has a better chance of lasting than a lot of other things. The Hobbit and the Narnia books, they seem to get handed down father to son, mother to daughter. Because they’re set in a fantasy world, they can remain relevant.
The first draft of a book – even a long one – should take no more than three months, the length of a season.
When you write a book, you spend day after day scanning and identifying the trees. When you’re done, you have to step back and look at the forest.
I’m not the first person to have said this – no writer ever feels that the execution of a book lives up to the idea for that book. The execution always falls short.
The books are always there, just the way you wrote them. The plays often don’t turn out the way you wanted them to because in the theater, you’re always involved with collaborators and they don’t always see the work the way you do.
I enjoy going back and forth between plays and novels. It’s like having a wife and a mistress. Books are the wife; plays, the mistress.
As we get older, our fears, in some way, sharpen and become more personal, because we can no longer – let’s say take a book like “It” or maybe “Christine,” and say these are make-believe fears.
My books depend on someone in danger, putting pieces together and figuring things out. They do a lot of thinking, and that gets lost in the movie.
Not every book has to be loaded with symbolism, irony, or musical language, but it seems to me that every book-at least every one worth reading-is about something.
Every book you pick up has its own lesson or lessons, and quite often the bad books have more to teach than the good ones.
Only library books speak with such wordless eloquence of the power good stories hold over us.
Superhero movies and comic books teach a lesson that runs directly counter to the culture-of-violence idea: guns are for bad guys too cowardly to fight like men.