Success is just hanging out with my kids. I mean, I always say if you have options, you’re rich. To me, success is the fact that hey, I just did a movie and maybe I’ll do some stand up, maybe I’ll will write a book or maybe I will do a play.
Learn how to cook. Read books that will educate you. Get an education. Get a career. And support yourself. And live in a section of town that isn’t conducive to violence.
The younger generation is surrounded by the Internet, apps, and video games. But somehow, my books make them read.
I myself don’t know what makes my books work. I enter a bookstore and I’m frankly overwhelmed by the number of books in most of them, and I know people are buying mine.
Even now I try to make each page compelling for the readers to get absorbed in the book.
I just downloaded eleven hundred books onto my Kindle, and now I can’t lift it.
There’s a big difference between the National Book Awards and the Academy Awards. At the Academy Awards you can feel the greed and envy and ego. Whereas the National Book Awards are in New York.
I was very interested in vaudeville. It was the only sort of discipline that was a five-minute act on stage, which is what I really enjoyed and saw myself doing. And I bought books on it.
There are many people who reach their conclusions about life like schoolboys: they cheat their master by copying the answer out of a book without having worked the sum out for themselves.
Words and a book and a belief that the world is words...
The job of the first eight pages is not to have the reader want to throw the book at the wall, during the first eight pages.
The point of books is to combat loneliness.
I never outline. I don’t work from an outline. I have no idea where the book is going. I mean, even two-thirds of the way through, I don’t know how it’s going to end.
If you want to make a name for yourself, the oldest trick in the book is to attack what everybody else reveres.
I would only read the novels that people classify as ‘beach books’ if I were being held prisoner and the only alternative was the ‘Book of Mormon.’
One of my books is a hallucinogen, an aphrodisiac, a mood elevator, an intellectual garage door opener, and a metaphysical trash compactor. They’ll do everything except rotate your tires.
If the novelist isn’t surprised by where his book ends up, he or she probably hasn’t written anything worth remembering.
As a child, my number one best friend was the librarian in my grade school. I actually believed all those books belonged to her.
Getting out of the hospital is a lot like resigning from a book club. You’re not out of it until the computer says you’re out of it.
Grandma told me Mama was once caught by the Principal for writing in the front of her book, “In Case of Fire, Throw This in First.” I have never had so much respect for Mama as the day I heard this.