I write a book over a period of months or years, and when I'm done with it, usually another year goes by before I see it in print. It's hard to be patient and wait.

It's just so much fun to make up characters, situations, and everything else about a story. I have so much freedom and flexibility to do whatever I want.

After I've sent my revised draft to my agent and editor, they suggest more improvement sand again, this revision phase can take anywhere from a few hours to a few months.

Generally I finish a first draft in 2-6 months, then I set it aside for a while so that when I come back to it I can read it with fresh eyes and figure out how to improve it.

I write a book over a period of months or years, and when I'm done with it, usually another year goes by before I see it in print. It's hard to be patient and wait.

The deadlines are much, much longer with books. When I was a reporter, a lot of times I'd come in at 8:30 a.m., get an assignment right away, interview somebody, turn the story in by 9:30, and have the finished story in the paper that landed on my desk by noon.

I was lucky enough not to face any required summer reading lists until I went to college. So I still think of summer as the best time to read for fun.

Sometimes I can spend as long revising a manuscript as I spent writing it in the first place.

I like playing around with the words; I love it when I feel like I've picked the exact right word to describe whatever it is I'm trying to describe.

I loved to read when I was a kid, and as soon as I realized that an actual person got to make up the books I loved so much, I decided that that was the job for me.

I started trying to write when I was in second or third grade.

I think I learned a lot from reading in general - even from reading badly written books.

There's something about each of my books that I'm really proud of, and there's something about each of my books that I cringe over.

When writing isn't going well-then the bad thing about being a writer is that I also have the freedom and flexibility to do something badly, and no one else can fix it for me.

I like the fact that kids are willing to be imaginative and go along with me when I'm telling strange tales.

Eventually the bad stuff I'm writing turns into better stuff. Other times, I've just walked away from what I was working on, and figured I'd have a better perspective when I came back to it.

'Batman' took 10 months to film, and by the time I stopped working on it, it took a long time before my English accent came out again. I was actually having to try for it.

Given six months to live and being the fighter that I am, I set high goals for myself.

It wasn't my plan to create such a record. All I did was put in the effort to win every match I played and it went on for weeks, months and years until my defeat to Ross Norman in Toulouse in 1986.

It was pretty extensive - we worked out 8 hours a day, 5 days a week, for 3 months, which I think is more than anybody in the Olympics. I thought well I don't need this, the girls need it, but it was a gift.

I would not be gotten into a schoolhouse until I was eight years old. Nor did I accomplish much after I started. I doubt if I had gone to school six months in all when my father died. I was fourteen at the time.

We all laughed. It was more like that whole thing that I was talking about earlier. You go to training camp and after the season is over, you might not see the guys for six months until you go back to training camp.

Oh yeah, I mean, it wasn't a very good guitar, most good guitars have got thrust rods in the necks that you can adjust or that'll keep them in shape, you know keep them straight. This one just, well it turned into a bow and arrow after a couple of months.

I am a writer. I could not afford to take 15 months off from my writing career to play detective.

You know, I live a monastic lifestyle. No, I do. I do live in extremes, basically. I go back and forth. Once every six months, I'll have a day where I eat more chocolate than has ever been consumed by a human being.

I knew that if I wrote a new book every six months or every year, if I continued to read great books, eventually I would write something worthy of publication. I understood I might be in my forties or my fifties or even my sixties, but I felt confident that it would happen.

The penalty for laughing in a courtroom is six months in jail; if it were not for this penalty, the jury would never hear the evidence.

I think a benefit is that we try to put it up in a short time. From the decision to do this mission until we fly, it's six months and one week or so, so it's a very short time.

One day my wife went and saw the accountant and said she's pulling the plug. She said you guys are done. I said, how bad can it be? 10 grand? She said you're not even close. It came out to almost $50,000 in alcohol for two months.

Well, by the end of the millennium, five, six months from now, we hope to somehow manage to move into a new location where we have the whole building, so we can devote space to all our activities.

The accent got lost somewhere along the way. I'm a little embarrassed about it. When I arrived in LA I assumed I'd be able to put on the American accent. It proved difficult so I had six months working with a dialect coach and it's become a habit.

I went from 118 pounds to 135 pounds in a few months. But, I still didn't know anything about food.

But since day one, we've always been kinda up against it. So at the end, it's not surprising that we were kind of led along for so many months and didn't know what the fate of the show was gonna be. It was... in a weird way, just kind of that was the way it's always been.

It gets kinda monotonous, but that's television. There are plus sides and down sides. The positive side is that you have steady work for nine months of the year for however many years your show is on TV,.

There's no way that I could do a 9 to 5 job. There's no way. I was not cut out for that. You come in and you work for three months on the one job. They say, 'Great,' you know, and you're on to the next one - and you never even got fired. It's wonderful.

I was 20 years old at Pearl Harbor. I was in the Navy about a year and four months before the war.

The reality is, it will be a significant conflict going for many, many months, if not longer. Saddam Hussein is not a fool. He hasn't been sitting there waiting to get shot for 13 years.

And also it was a process of, we lifted weights as well, in an effort to train my body to then be able to lift heavier weights when I got in Australia. So that was the first couple of months.

There's no huge, deep message in any of the songs. We recorded a few months of being human.

Being in drag for three months - I now have an idea of what women go through. At least maybe a little.

I became CEO at the beginning of the hit on old economy stocks. When something like that occurs in your first six months as a CEO of a more traditional branded firm, it makes for a fast learning curve.

Even if the dollar does decline during the coming months, the delays in the response of exports and imports to the more competitive dollar will mean that the increase in aggregate demand from this source may not happen for a year or more.

You can make more friends in two months by becoming really interested in other people, than you can in two years by trying to get other people interested in you.

The fact is five months ago this was an issue that people weren't really talking that much about. Because of the president's leadership, because he's brought it to people's attention, it's now a top issue.

We had to depend on other institutions to do research on our behalf. We had to use the information that already existed to craft the best practices to distribute throughout the country. And we had to do all of that in ten months.

They have the big ferris wheel and we've been out of town for two months, so he just was like, 'Mommy I want to go to Toys R Us and I don't care if you have a movie coming out and all that.' He was just being a kid. But I had to allow him to have that moment.

I think we had made some tremendous progress in the six months before I left.

I've never really taken more than four days off, so it was a lot for me to go away for three-and-a-half months. I went all over Europe. I walked on a whole bunch of beaches and I did a lot of thinking.

I don't know what's going to happen. I'm flavor of the month at the moment, but somebody else is going to roll around the corner in three months' time. I just want to keep working. I can't stop!