I am proud and more than a little excited to be asked to work with Faber in an editorial capacity. It is my dearest hope that we will produce some fantastic books together.
A man can stand a lot as long as he can stand himself. He can live without hope without friends without books even without music as long as he can listen to his own thoughts.
I think almost every writer in the world would hope that books would be always talked about with respect and civility and depth and seriousness.
I don't know how many good books I still have in me I hope there are another four or five.
About 15 years ago I went though a period of a year or so when I just couldn't find anything good. My wife noticed I was having trouble reading menus. I bought some cheap reading glasses in a drug store. I got home and suddenly all these books that weren't good were good.
I think the advent of the Internet gave us all a big boost because by the time the Internet became mainstream and you could get it in your home a lot of us were used to dealing in fan culture writing to magazines or anything at the back of comic books.
In the later books I am much more at home in the use of language to describe things. I had never thought of that until a critic pointed that out.
Home base is the support system where we have a culinary team my own writers because of the shows and the books and stuff we have a culinary team of about six people. Marketing public relations accounting and all that sort of stuff.
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.
A home without books is a body without soul.
The instruction we find in books is like fire. We fetch it from our neighbours kindle it at home communicate it to others and it becomes the property of all.
Life is a wonderful thing to talk about or to read about in history books - but it is terrible when one has to live it.
Everything was going my way. I was happily marching into the history books. Then it all just fell apart.
Jews read the books of Moses not just as history but as divine command. The question to which they are an answer is not 'What happened?' but rather 'How then shall I live?' And it's only with the exodus that the life of the commands really begins.
Jews have a special relationship to books and the Haggadah has been translated more widely and reprinted more often than any other Jewish book. It is not a work of history or philosophy not a prayer book user's manual timeline poem or palimpsest - and yet it is all these things.
Part of what I loved - and love - about being around older people is the tangible sense of history they embody. I'm interested in military history for instance because both my grandfathers fought in World War II. I'm interested in writing because one of those grandfathers wrote books.
It's in the history books the Holocaust. It's just a phrase. And the truth is it happened yesterday. It happened to my mother. I never met my grandmothers or my grandfathers. They were all wiped up in the gas chambers of Nazi Germany.
If a secret history of books could be written and the author's private thoughts and meanings noted down alongside of his story how many insipid volumes would become interesting and dull tales excite the reader!
Without words without writing and without books there would be no history there could be no concept of humanity.
Books are the carriers of civilization. Without books history is silent literature dumb science crippled thought and speculation at a standstill.
History books that contain no lies are extremely dull.
If you think you have it tough read history books.
Who has fully realized that history is not contained in thick books but lives in our very blood?
The Bible is one of the most genocidal books in history.