book

Architecture has recorded the great ideas of the human race. Not only every religious symbol, but every human thought has its page in that vast book.

Architecture is a very dangerous job. If a writer makes a bad book, eh, people don't read it. But if you make bad architecture, you impose ugliness on a place for a hundred years.

The joke in our family is that we can cry reading the phone book.

What I want to do is tell stories about normal people in the American suburbs. I don't write the book where it's a conspiracy reaching the prime minister; I don't write the book with the big serial killer who lops off heads. My setting is a very placid pool of suburbia, family life. And within that I can make pretty big splashes.

For something that's supposed to be secret, there is a lot of intelligence history. Every time I read one book, two more are published.

An intelligence officer and historian, Rayburn published a 2014 book, 'Iraq After America,' which is a must-read for anyone who wants to understand how Iraq descended into chaos in the years after the American troop withdrawal at the end of 2011.

There's a popular concept of 'intelligence' as book smarts, like calculus or chess, as opposed to, say, social skills. So people say that 'it takes more than intelligence to succeed in human society.' But social skills reside in the brain, not the kidneys.

I get up in the morning. I usually do a radio interview early in the morning. I usually do a book signing, because I'm also a cookbook author, so I'm at some store, at a Walmart or a Williams Sonoma, for three hours, standing up, signing autographs, and taking pictures for three hours.

I work all day, morning and afternoon, just about every day. If I sit there like that for two or three years, at the end I have a book.

I was never a comic book guy. I like the movies when I see them, especially the origin stories. I never felt like I could be on the set, at 3 o'clock in the morning, tired, with 10 important decisions to make, and know, intuitively, what the story needs. For me, I'd be copycatting and not inventing. I've never said yes to one.

My mother says I was two-and-a-half when I started playing. My father was a minister, and when he went to church in the morning, she would put on Fats Waller, Billie Holiday, Nat King Cole and Cole Porter records. I'd crawl up on the piano stool, sit on a phone book and play.

You can't get a cup of tea big enough or a book long enough to suit me.

You know you're getting old when all the names in your black book have M. D. after them.

In this age of the electronic media and the mass distribution of the printed word, God will hold us accountable if we do not now move the Book of Mormon in a monumental way.

If you can't write a book, write a chapter. If you can't do that, write a page, a sentence or a word. For it is from a single word that books are made.

'Catcher in the Rye.' I feel like any brooding teen loves that book.

There's an indie movie I did called 'Fat Kid Rules the World,' which was based on a teen book, and it's a fabulous story, and hopefully it'll go to theaters because it is an amazing story.

If I can write a book that will help the world make a little more sense to a teen, then that's why I was put on the planet.