Joseph Campbell, who when asked what spiritual practice he followed said, "I underline books." Me too.
Children's books are by nature partisan.
Better is a book than a well built house.
When I ask candidates to tell me about their weaknesses, I am hoping for a wise, honest, and self-confident answer. When I hear a candidate rationally admit a weakness, I am impressed. When I hear a candidate duck the question with language straight out of a book, I start thinking about the next candidate.
Basically, I'm a perpetual student. I start by finding a subject I really don't know very much, but that I'm curious about. I learn about it through books in a library, by doing interviews with people who know a lot about the subject, and by going out on my own and seeing for myself what's happening.
For explanations, they did not look in the pages of the visitor's book to see if others likewise found that ghostly happenings abound.
I got Michael Caine's book, Acting In Film, and I read it on the plane, desperately trying to glean information from him about how to adapt my craft, which was actually very helpful.
I'm kind of a comic book geek, but I'm not really a super hero comic book geek.
Some people are just so happy to get published to, they sign anything. Next thing you know, they've signed over the rights to their book.
I don't [even] know the number of books on Abraham Lincoln. Ten thousand, twelve thousand? I have seen various numbers. It seems like every generation is always trying to come to terms with Lincoln.
You pick up very well-known books on Lincoln [and] you will find almost no reference to his long-term belief in colonization. Why? Because it doesn't fit the image of the Great Emancipator. It doesn't fit the retrospective view we want to have of Lincoln as the man who was the moralist in politics, who came into office committed to ending slavery and waited to sign this document.
We had collaborated with Allen Ginsberg on one of his last projects just before he died in the spring of '97, a book called Illuminated Poems - it was Allen's poems and songs and I illustrated them. Or, I illuminated them with paintings and drawings that bounced off of them. You want the picture to relate to the text without it slavishly regurgitating it or merely illustrating it, because that's redundant. You want to show another angle of what the text is saying.
Yeah I was aware of the book, but hadn't read it. So as soon as I'd finished the script, I got a copy of the book and read that. My wife had read it and she loves it, so that was a good sounding board. I like her writing style, she's such a page-turner. I enjoyed The Constant Princess as well. I think she's great. The books are very popular with women and I can see why.
Before my sister, Sara, and I went to bed at night, my mom would show us books on Manet and other artists. Even then I was always really interested in how the women looked in the images.
If you're going to read five books, three should be issues and two for fun.
I have always loved 'Stig of the Dump.' I think reading that book made me officially realise that I was a reader.
What many people don't know about 'Peter Pan' is that it's a very violent book and Hook is one of the most finely observed villains ever.
I often meet frustrated young writers who say they've only got so far and just can't finish a book. Even if you don't happen to use what you've worked on that day, it has taught you something and you'll be amazed when you might come back to it and use it again.
I learned about sex the hard way... from books.
My father read Günter Grass. He introduced me to German literature. I believe the first book I read by a German author was from Grass. After that, Thomas Mann accompanied me for a few years during my literature studies. I tried again and again to read the original German text, but I never really succeeded.
Hindsight is obviously a very great thing, but I'm always convinced that the reason that I didn't take as many politics or history classes is because I just didn't see any women. I didn't think when I was 13, 14 that that had anything to do with me. I just didn't see women in my textbooks.
It sounds so geeky, but I really do like studying and reading, and if I'm not working on 'Harry Potter,' then my greatest relaxation is to sit with a book.
My personal view is that reading has to be balanced. Obviously, there's a certain amount of reading that we have to do academically to continue to learn and to grow, but it's got to be balanced with fun and with elective reading. Whether that's comic books or Jane Austen, if it makes you excited about reading, that's what matters.
People aren't stupid. People wanna see good movies, especially comedies. Those by the books comedies, I don't get it. Who likes those? Nobody likes those.
Viola Davis keeps saying this movie should be called The Big Responsibility instead of The Help, because there were so many groups of people that you wanna do right by. You want to do right by Southerners and the African-American community and the readers of the book and the people that grew up with domestics and the people who worked as domestics. There's a million different groups that you're trying to please and satisfy that you're worried about not loving what comes across onscreen.
