Book Quotes - Page 529

Why is it that reality, when set down untransposed in a book, sounds false?

I only read what I am hungry for at the moment when I have an appetite for it, and then I do not read, I eat.

Romance novels are my favorite books to read. I write young adult romances, and am so happy to be promoting this wonderful genre.

Fans always say they laughed and they cried while reading my books. And I tell them that I laughed and cried while writing them.

I like to write books that touch my heart. I want to entertain, and I love to entertain myself.

...there's no rule book or game plan when it comes to the grim realities of our lives.

A man would never get the notion of writing a book on the peculiar situation of the human male.

So research is a terribly imperfect science, and you learn an awful lot more after you've published a book, because people keep writing to you and saying, 'Oh, gosh, I was related to such and such a character and I have a letter in my possession.'

Any grand new dictionary ought itself to be a democratic product, a book that demonstrated the primacy of individual freedoms, of the notion that one could use words freely, as one liked, without hard and fast rules of lexical conduct.

When my books came out, they started selling but they started selling at a relatively consistent but low pace. And they started to pick up the pace.

I never imagined I'd write a book.

I don't hire any companies or ask any of my friends to write reviews for me on Amazon when I have a book come out so they can drive up my ratings on Amazon. I don't have a publicist.

What's important to me is that I put messages out, whether it's a TED talk, whether it's a book.

Nobody writes a book to get rich. It's like speaking.

Too many people write books because they want to be a New York Times best-seller. They want the glory and the fame.

If you're looking for a book that will spike in sales and then go away and then spike again when it comes out in paperback, your normal model, I definitely won't give you that.

Too many people write books as a calling card.

If you're interested in a book that will steadily grow and sell for a very long time, I promise you I will give you that.

Academic experts may not be good at doing what they are experts in themselves, but they are good at explaining the subject matter to others. They write books, teach courses and offer lessons and give steps others can follow.

Rule books tell people what to do. Frameworks guide people how to act. Rule books insist on discipline. Frameworks allow for creativity.

Following takes why. Transactions take what. It has to be real. It has to be the same for writing a book.

You have to write a book because you believe it has helped you, because you believe it has helped others personally and you are dying to share with it others because you know it will add value to their lives. You write it for them like a gift. You don't want anything from them. You don't want them to do anything for you. You don't even care if they all share the book with their friends, they don't all have to buy them. You're just dying to share this idea with people. Your challenge is to write it in a way that is compelling, enjoyable to read so that they will get the idea.

I never really liked "cool" books. I plowed through as much Borges and Joyce as possible, read the first half of V. and spent whole Bar Mitzvah checks on Beat poetry.

I read a ton of nonfiction. I tend to read about a lot of very extreme situations, life-or-death situations. I'm very interested in books about Arctic exploration or about doomed Apollo missions. I tend to read a lot of nonfiction that's sort of hyperbolic and visceral. And then I kind of draw on my own personal experiences and my own sort of generic life experience, and I kind of try to feed my day-to-day reality that I have with sort of high stakes reference points that I read about. They're things everyone can relate to.

By the time I got to college I had stopped reading books because I wanted to "be cool" and started reading books simply because I wanted to read them. I discovered heroes like Roth, King, Dahl, Shirley Jackson, Patricia Highsmith, TC Boyle, Douglas Adams, Neil Gaiman, David Sedaris. These people weren't trying to "rebel against the literary establishment." They were trying to write great, high-quality books that were as entertaining and moving as possible.