I've been a lifelong horror fan, but at the same time, I would say 90 percent of my reading is biographies and nonfiction history.

Father may have been wanting in some things, but here he was masterful. Night upon night, I marveled at his power to hold listeners in rapt attention. He could tell a story with such detail, such flourish, that afterwards a man could swear it had been his own memory, and not a tale at all.

Abraham Lincoln comes from nothing, has no education, no money, lives in the middle of nowhere on the frontier. And despite the fact that he suffers one tragedy and one setback after another, through sheer force of will, he becomes something extraordinary: not only the president but the person who almost single-handedly united the country.

Most men have no purpose but to exist, Abraham; to pass quietly through history as minor characters upon a stage they cannot even see

Pride and Prejudice' - perhaps more than any other Jane Austen book - is engrained in our literary consciousness.

If you write really good material, the rest just falls into place. There's really no trick to it.

It's absurd to think of 'Pride and Prejudice,' this classic, beloved book, beset with a zombie uprising. The goal is to make you suspend your disbelief enough to allow you to get lost in the story and believe what you're reading for a while.