I like reading books where people with a lot of money use it to do whatever they want. Like stay in expensive hotels and do whatever drugs they want and fly wherever they want.
All writers believe in the magic of books; Jim Hines has created a system where that magic becomes real, usable, and very definitely not always safe.
I was reading some complex books in my own youth-and no, I didnt always understand every word, let alone every concept-but I got the main thrust, which was like a lifeline in a fluctuating world.
I held out my book. It was precious to me, as were all the things I'd written; even where I despised their inadequacy there was not one I would disown. Each tore its way from my entrails. Each had shortened my life, killed me with its own special little death.
I'd never written a book or a story that required meeting people, and that's not necessarily my best skill, even in English. I prefer to do my research in books.
I read a lot. I always have, but in those two years I gorged myself on books with a voluptuous, almost erotic gluttony. I would go to the local library and take out as many as I could, and then lock myself in the bedsit and read solidly for a week. I went for old books, the older the better - Tolstoy, Poe, Jacobean tragedies, a dusty translation of Laclos - so that when I finally resurfaced, blinking and dazzled, it took me days to stop thinking in their cool, polished, crystalline rhythms.
It took my breath away, that evening. If you've ever dreamed that you walked into your best-loved book or film or TV program, then maybe you've got some idea how it felt: things coming alive around you, strange and new and utterly familiar at the same time; the catch in your heartbeat as you move through the rooms that had such a vivid untouchable life in your mind, as your feet actually touch the carpet, as you breathe the air; the odd, secret glow of warmth as these people you've been watching for so long, from so far away, open their circle and sweep you into it.
I thought I could never write a proper book; I'd never done it before. But I thought I could write a sequence. Then I had a chapter. The next thing I knew I was turning acting down.
I'm about to commence four years of obeying the cause of a bruiser on a horse. I refuse to put down what might be the last book I see for months.
We live in a dark time. Books are as dark as what is available to teenagers through the media every day.
With each book, in each place, I have to keep an ongoing map as I write because otherwise I don't know where I am.
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?
Teen problem novels? I can go through them like a box of chocolates. And there are fantasy books out now that need a lot more editing. Fantasy got to be so popular that people began to think 'We don't need to be as diligent with the razor blade,' but they do.
Books are still the main yardstick by which I measure true wealth.
What people tell me they take away from my books is that they can shape their lives, they can achieve their own dreams. And certainly that's what I want them to take away.
The fact is that we wouldn't have found out about Manzanar except in our story-telling because it was really never told in the American history books when we attended school. So we were very, very lucky to have that part of history told.
Hillary Clinton and her husband, the former president, are of course by all measures quite wealthy as well, having earned tens of millions of dollars in book royalties and speaking fees in recent years. Which is why in speeches, she leans heavily on her family history.
Producer Ed Pressman had a book about Diane Arbus - it's the only biography that exists - and there had been many Diane Arbus scripts. Many. I don't even know how many over the years. And it's sort of a cursed project, for lots of reasons. There's probably some pile somewhere of all these weird attempts, all these portraitures that can't get made.
If you want to write about a person who isn't nice, people say, "This is a bad book. It's about somebody I couldn't stand." But that's not the point. You don't have to like a character to like a book. Most of the time, people would misjudge and say, "I didn't like the book." No, you didn't like the character. That doesn't make it any less interesting of a book. In fact, to me, it makes it more interesting.
Every book I write, the media just keeps punching me in the face.
In my writing I wanted to be liked for writing really unlikeable stuff. There were books that people, particularly women, hated so much. They said, "I threw it against the wall!" Which, in my opinion, was a compliment. Because it's very hard to get somebody to throw something.
Once in a very long time you come across a book that is far, far more than the ink, the glue and the paper, a book that seeps into your blood.
Once in a very long time you come across a book that is far, far more than the ink, the glue and the paper, a book that seeps into your blood. With such a book the impact isn't necessarily obvious at first...but the more you read it and re-read it, and live with it, and travel with it, the more it speaks to you, and the more you realize that you cannot live without that book. It's then that the wisdom hidden inside, the seed, is passed on.
THE NAME OF THE WIND has everything fantasy readers like, magic and mysteries and ancient evil, but it's also humorous and terrifying and completely believable. As with all the very best books in our field, it's not the fantasy trappings (wonderful as they are) that make this novel so good, but what the author has to say about true, common things, about ambition and failure, art, love, and loss.
I think if you read all my books you know where I stand, pretty much. You could probably give the reader a questionnaire and they could figure out what I'm about. But I don't think my job is to tell you that.
