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"I've written 16 children's books and five unpublished novels. Some of the latter were breathtakingly bad."
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"Always in my books, I like to throw that rogue element into a stable situation and then see what happens."
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Personal Development
"The proper study of mankind is books."
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Personal Development
"We are motivated by a keen desire for praise, and the better a man is the more he is inspired by glory. The very philosophers themselves, even in those books which they write in contempt of glory, inscribe their names."
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Personal Development
"I was burning through books every day - stories about people and places I'd never heard of. They were perhaps the only thing that kept me from teetering into utter despair."
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Personal Development
"Prolonged, indiscriminate reviewing of books is a quite exceptionally thankless, irritating and exhausting job. It not only involves praising trash but constantly inventing reactions towards books about which one has no spontaneous feeling whatever."
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Personal Development
"You may not be able to change the course of government, but you can achieve some peace. And books were the path to that. I grew up in a house where books were everywhere."
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Personal Development
"When I was growing up in the 1960s, there was starting to be more books geared towards young adults."
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Personal Development
"I hate books; they only teach us to talk about what we don't know."
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Personal Development
"Every day I ran to that book like it was a bottle of whiskey and crawled inside because it was a world that I had at least some control over, and slowly, in time, it began to take shape."
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Personal Development
"I have always read all the latest cookery books and magazines, from all over the world."
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"From a good book, I want to be taken to the very edge. I want a glimpse into that outer darkness."
Darkness
"If you enjoy math and you write novels, it's very rare that you'll get a chance to put your math into a novel. I leapt at the chance."
Chance
"If kids like a picture book, they're going to read it at least 50 times. Read anything that often, and even minor imperfections start to feel like gravel in the bed."
Reading
"No one wants to know how clever you are. They don't want an insight into your mind, thrilling as it might be. They want an insight into their own."
Mind
"I don't mean that literary fiction is better than genre fiction, On the contrary; novels can perform two functions and most perform only one."
Fiction
"As a kid, I didn't read a great deal of fiction, and I've forgotten most of what I did read."
Fiction
"I am atheist in a very religious mould. I'm always asking myself the big questions. Where did we come from? Is there a meaning to all of this? When I find myself in church, I edit the hymns as I sing them."
Church
"Writing for children is bloody difficult; books for children are as complex as their adult counterparts, and they should therefore be accorded the same respect."
Books
"When I was writing for children, I was writing genre fiction. It was like making a good chair. It needed four legs of the same length, it had to be the right height and it had to be comfortable."
Family
"If one book's done this well, you want to write another one that does just as well. There's that horror of the second novel that doesn't match up."
Horror
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