I've always wanted to be a part of that experience of writing to an audience that is just starting to fall in love with books. When I felt that my writing for adults had become cemented, I decided to write a YA series.
I've always loved cemeteries since I was a kid. They're very calm.
I listen to them freely and with all the respect merited by their intelligence, their character, their knowledge, reserving always my incontestable right of criticism and censure.
My mum always told me 95 per cent of success was partnering well.
You just want something else that someone else has, but that doesn't mean what you have isn't beautiful, because people always want what you have, and you always want what they have - no one is ever 100 per cent like, 'Yes, I'm the bomb dot com - from head to toe!'
A lot of the fiction I read growing up was post-war American, and not all of it centers on Manhattan, but around people of the Mad Men generation, people like John Cheever and, in more modern times, Don DeLillo, who I always mention.
Much historical fiction that centers on real people has always been deficient in information, lacking in craft and empty in affect.
There's no excuse for the macro corruption, but Afghanistan was always an informal society with a weak central government.
It has always been, and still is, my intention to build a playground in Central Park.
The communism of Marx seeks a strong state centralization, and where this exists, there the parasitic Jewish nation - which speculates upon the labor of people - will always find the means for its existence.
Each man is always in the middle of the surface of the earth and under the zenith of his own hemisphere, and over the centre of the earth.
Whitman will always be a strange and unwonted figure among his country's poets, and among English poets generally: a cropping out again, after so many centuries, of the old bardic prophetic strain.
Genius always finds itself a century too early.
I think Rush have always had this reputation, particularly to non-fans, of being an ultra-serious and cerebral group when, in fact, the reverse is true. We don't take ourselves seriously at all. Sure, we take our music seriously, but that's altogether different.
For me, Christmas was always about presents. As a child, we each had an allotted place in the sitting room for the ceremonial unwrapping and mine was perched beside the telly on a Moroccan pouffe. We would watch our mum with bated breath as she divided up the gifts.
The juke joint, the honky tonk, and the ballroom also represent one more thing, anthropologically speaking: a ceremonial context for the male-with-female-duet dance flirtation and embrace, upon which the zoological survival of the human species has always been predicated.
I go to award ceremonies, but I always like to be in my world. That's the only place I can control where I won't get upset.
If you believe in science, like I do, you believe that there are certain laws that are always obeyed.
In a sense the quest for the emancipation of black people in the U.S. has always been a quest for economic liberation which means to a certain extent that the rise of black middle class would be inevitable.
When I'm writing, I can always play around with tense. I can always make past present. I can always kind of manipulate, and I can always be delusional in a way that's completely self-serving. With film, it's like, the camera can't really lie. It can manipulate to a certain extent.
