It used to be that comic strips were the big thing, and comic books were toilet paper.
I haven't been very enthusiastic about the commercialization of children's literature. Kids should borrow books from the library and not necessarily be buying them.
My kind publishers, Toby Mundy and Margaret Stead of Atlantic Books, have commissioned me to write the life of Queen Victoria.
There are three schoolmasters for everybody that will employ them - the senses, intelligent companions, and books.
We are as liable to be corrupted by books, as by companions.
I turn to books for a feeling of companionship: for somebody knowing what I have known.
Poetry is all I write, whether for books or readings or for the National Theatre or for the opera house and concert hall or even for TV.
Books about spies and traitors - and the congressional hearings that follow the exposure of traitors - generally assume that false-negative errors are much worse than false-positive errors.
It is from books that wise people derive consolation in the troubles of life.
Who has fully realized that history is not contained in thick books but lives in our very blood?
My temper is of a recluse and contemplative cast; had it been otherwise, I should, perhaps, on some former occasions, have entered into the active concerns of the world and not have been connected with it merely as a writer of books.
My books have contradictions all the time - and people are fine with that.
I have always read all the latest cookery books and magazines, from all over the world.
Cooking, decorating, diet/self-help and gardening books are guilty pleasures and useful time fillers.
I don't keep any copies of my books in the house - they go to my mum's flat. I don't like them around.
We had to figure out how to produce books in a cost-effective way.
I read daft history books. Sometimes the books I read are a bit crackers or strange.
When I was in prison, I was wrapped up in all those deep books. That Tolstoy crap - people shouldn't read that stuff.
I wrote 'Knots and Crosses,' the first of the Rebus books, not even realising that I was writing crime fiction.
About 75 percent of the crude oil marketed here is sold off the books, and they are doing trades that would be illegal if it was a regulated market, and of course they do not want to regulate it.
