A Quote by James Goodnight

I'm not big on reading business books. I get copies of all of them, because people want me to put a comment on the jacket. Every once in a while, I'll get interested and read one all the way through.
If you are resolutely determined to make a lawyer of yourself, the thing is more than half done already. It is but a small matter whether you read with anyone or not. I did not read with anyone. Get the books, and read and study them till you understand them in their principal features; and that is the main thing. It is of no consequence to be in a large town while you are reading. I read at New Salem, which never had three hundred people living in it. The books, and your capacity for understanding them, are just the same in all places.
I still love books. Nothing a computer can do can compare to a book. You can't really put a book on the Internet. Three companies have offered to put books by me on the Net, and I said, 'If you can make something that has a nice jacket, nice paper with that nice smell, then we'll talk.' All the computer can give you is a manuscript. People don't want to read manuscripts. They want to read books. Books smell good. They look good. You can press it to your bosom. You can carry it in your pocket.
I have to put a business model together because certain businesses are approaching me as a legend, as if I'm on my way out. Same goes for the way I get presented on the VH1 Hip Hop Honors and BET. I get lifetime achievement awards because of who I am and what I've done, but they want to put me in a place, as if I'm on my way out.
I don't want people reading my books just because they're horror or mysteries. I want them to read them because they're Joe Lansdale books.
Once I'd worked out that I couldn't possibly expect people to enjoy a monstrous, 3000-page book, I realised I could in fact create a labyrinth of a story with four different points of entry. But what interested me was creating something that would rearrange itself every time you read one of the other books. So depending on which order you read them, the implications and angles would change. To get that right, each one of the books had to have its own personality and texture -- even though they are connected, they are very different creatures.
Authors all have at least one thing in common, which is that when we finally get finished copies of our books, we get giddy as kindergartners. We touch them constantly, and build towers with them, and take pictures of our cats and dogs reading them.
My mom was big on education, big on reading, so she was always pushing books on me: 'The Autobiography of Malcolm X,' like, 'Read these books.' And it was like, man, I'm learning stuff that I just can't get anywhere else.
People say that you can't change people's minds with a movie or book, but how do they get formed in the first place? They get formed by what we see and read. In a certain way, movies are ahead of their times. People make them and don't really know if the audience will respond to them. Once in a while, they do.
While I read almost all my newspapers online, I'm not a big fan of e-books because I like to see what I've read and remember it. Books are a way of making memory physical.
I always say that, to me, it starts with reading. This is something I tell high school kids, college kids, people trying to get into the business, that it's just so much about reading. Read, read, read. So much of everything else falls into place when you just do a ton of reading.
Attention spans are changing. It's very noticeable. I am very aware that the kind of books I read in my childhood kids now won't be able to read. I was reading Kipling and PG Wodehouse and Shakespeare at the age of 11. The kind of description and detail I read I would not put in my books. I don't know how much you can fight that because you want children to read. So I pack in excitement and plot and illustrations and have a cliffhanger every chapter. Charles Dickens was doing cliffhangers way back when. But even with all the excitement you have to make children care about the characters.
We've overmedicated kids. Quite frankly, some of the overmedication of kids are because welfare moms want to get additional benefits, and if they can put them on SSI through maintenance drugs, they can also put them on Social Security disability and get a separate check. That is wrong on every single level.
I don't finish a lot of the books I read. I get enormous pleasure from reading half f them, two-thirds of them, even incredibly good books. But I don't feel it's my duty to finish them. I read the last few pages and find out what happens at the end.
It used to take me forever to read and comprehend stuff, so I decided not to make the 'Captain Underpants' books too challenging. Don't get me wrong - the humor and ideas are often sophisticated - but the books aren't hard to read. I wanted kids who hate reading to find these books irresistible.
I don't read newspapers, and I've said I don't watch the news. I love books, but I don't read much. What I do is I get people to read to me, and I put the stories in my head.
With twins, reading aloud to them was the only chance I could get to sit down. I read them picture books until they were reading on their own.
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