Quotes About Books

In a way, editing is not unlike the movies. The best books, just like the best movies, are a collaboration. They're only as good as the compromise made between the artists involved.

The other thing is this industry has decided it only has one market. Unlike any other industry in the world, unlike film or books or sports even, this industry has decided it has only one market and that's 14 year old boys.

The American mind, unlike the English, is not formed by books, but, as Carl Sandburg once said to me... by newspapers and the Bible.

Publishers have realized that, unlike the previous time period, American teenagers are both smarter and require more topical material than they had been giving them before that. For one thing, they'll read thicker books. Besides, has anybody looked at the news or read the newspapers recently?

I'm excited about how books work in a digital age. When you read a book, unlike a film, you are decoding symbols in order to 'see' the story, so it is collaborative in a way that a film can never be.

Like most people, I like to give what I like to get. Unlike most people, I still like to get what I got in college - books, magazine subscriptions, CDs, T-shirts.

I can clearly trace my passion for reading back to the Jonesboro, Georgia, library, where, for the first time in my life, I had access to what seemed like an unlimited supply of books.

It's not as if I've been unlucky. My books have been published and reviewed. I haven't lived through terrible literary suffering!

When I was growing up, I always read horror books, while my sister read romance novels. My sister became unmarried and pregnant during high school, and she kept saying, 'This wasn't supposed to happen! Why is this happening to me?' Someone should have given her another book to read.

My parents used books as bribes: if I got straight A's on my report card, they would buy me one book. This was completely unnecessary, as I always got A's, and they bought me books all the time anyway, and we all knew it.

I'd quite like to write a book about comics, actually. But trying to write about comics as literature, which I don't think anyone's really done before. Sometimes they're more like fan books, and I'd quite like to write one about the Marvel universe over the last 50 years. It's an unprecedented achievement to create that length of continuity.

I am not by any stretch of the imagination a tidy person, and the piles of unread books on the coffee table and by my bed have a plaintive, pleading quality to me - 'Read me, please!'

I know that the last thing a book wants is to just sit around unread, serving as an element of interior decorating. So when I have people over, all they have to do is glance at my books, and I implore them to take a few home with them. If I am really ambitious, I pack books into boxes and donate them to prisons.

It sounds like a brag but I've got a separate room in my flat just for unread books; I don't let my read books touch my unread books.

I never thought I was writing for kids at all. It really shocked and unsettled me to hear kids were buying the books. If I'd known I was writing for kids, I might actually have spelt things out a bit more, and that would probably have killed the appeal.

The comforts come from my movie and television writing. It is unusual to live this well simply from books.

As a small kid, I came across things like these early Edward Gorey books in department-store bookstores. These were these really unusual objects to me. I didn't know how they fit into the comic world or into newspaper comics.

Sometimes I like to watch TV, though I never get to watch any of the shows in real time. I'm a fan of 'Downton Abbey,' 'Boardwalk Empire,' and 'Boss.' There's a British series called 'Luther,' but in England, they think a series means four episodes. And I like 'Mad Men.' Otherwise, it's always good to unwind with a book.

My knowledge of electrical subjects was not acquired in a methodical manner but was picked up from such books as I could get hold of and from such experiments as I could make with my own hands.

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.

What's the best way to ensure a supply of good books in the future? Support up-and-coming writers now.

People are often surprised that I am so upbeat. I'm always hearing, 'You're so light and funny, and your books are so dark and twisted.' There's a dichotomy. I like books that are dark and creepy. I don't control it - it's just what I gravitate toward.

I would say that, in the future, the book will be reserved for things that function best as a book. So, if I need a textbook that's going to be out of date because of new technological inventions, you're better off having it where you can download the supplements or the update.

I remember thinking that people were crazy for reading the same book more than once, but I now have a new-found appreciation for the re-discovery of literature. The lessons we learned from books in the school curriculum are reinvented and updated when we read as adults.