Pastoral Resources

I have to have a character worth caring about. I tend not to start writing books about people I don't have a lot of sympathy for because I'm just going to be with them too long.

My parents came to visit every two months and brought plenty of books.

There have been more books alone written about Hamlet than have been written about the Bible.

My gut feeling is that paper and ink are going to be with us for a long time yet, and in substantial quantities, though certainly books are now going to be available in other forms.

The comments I most appreciate come from ordinary readers who've happened on one of my books at some time of stress in their lives, and who actually credit the book with helping them through a bad time. It's happened a few times in forty years.

I guess if one set of my books was selling like Stephen King's, and the other wasn't selling at all, editors would want me to do the ones that sold like Stephen King's. But they seem to be willing to let me pick what I want to do next.

Probably all the books I've ever written have been efforts to define the boundaries of humanity.

There's probably one more story about Bosnia that I'd like to do, because I spent a fair amount of time on the Serb side of the lines, which isn't apparent in the other books.

All of the books in the world contain no more information than is broadcast as video in a single large American city in a single year. Not all bits have equal value.

The one thing I regret is that I will never have time to read all the books I want to read.

Kids just don't read any more. They spend much more time with video games. It's just hard to get kids to read anything. Book sales have dropped dramatically, too. I think 90% of the books are bought only by 5% of the US population.

I loved to read and to write, but then something happened. As I made my way through school, I kept getting handed books to read that didn't excite me and didn't even remotely connect to the realities of my life.

My room for books and study or for sitting and thinking about nothing in particular to see what would happen was at the end of a hall.

I knew I would read all kinds of books and try to get at what it is that makes good writers good. But I made no promises that I would write books a lot of people would like to read.

I had no books at home. I started to frequent a public library in Lisbon. It was there, with no help except curiosity and the will to learn, that my taste for reading developed and was refined.

All that I know about my life, it seems, I have learned in books.

I certainly grew up seeing more movies and television than I read books, but when it came time to do the thing itself you don't have to hire a lot of people to sit down and write a book, so that was the story-telling medium that was available to me.

Christ himself wrote nothing, but furnished endless material for books and songs of gratitude and praise.

There are writers in Germany who drink the Absolute like water; and there are books in which even the dogs make references to the Infinite.

To buy books would be a good thing if we also could buy the time to read them.