Book Quotes - Page 613

I do so much revising as I go along; I wonder how I could write books if I hadn't grown up in the computer age. I think I'd be a very different writer. I find myself cutting and pasting, changing things around and deleting whole paragraphs constantly.

I like working on action films, and I like working on movies that are comic book based, or that have this theme, because they're things I watched or loved as a kid.

I love comic books. I just do.

I've read the Book of Revelation a million times. It does not make sense, obviously. It needs to be decoded.

Aside from the posters, wherever there was room, there were books. Stacks and stacks of books. Books crammed into mismatched shelves and towers of books up to the ceiling. I liked my books.

[ The Nightingale ]ended up being a huge undertaking - a daunting amount of research on a subject that many people know intimately, a country I had not yet been to when I first started planning the book, an entire war.

To be honest, I wrote so many drafts of this book [ The Nightingale ] and changed the characters so many times; the real surprise is that I finished the book at all.

I had read a lot of books on World War II, but I didn't know that downed airmen had hiked over the frozen peaks of the Pyrenees Mountains in shoes that didn't fit, in clothes that weren't warm enough, with German and Spanish patrols searching for them.

In the end, the best part of the whole book [The Nightingale ] to me was the research, reading about the courageous, ordinary French women who put their lives on the line to save others. It was really inspirational.

Of course, there are hundreds of novels and authors that have influenced me. But to choose three, they are: Stephen King/The Stand (and really most of his books); Anne Rice/The Witching Hour; and Pat Conroy/The Prince of Tides. These authors write my favorite kind of book - epic feel, gorgeous prose, unique characters, and a pace that keeps you turning the pages. From them, I learned a lot about characterization, pacing, prose, voice, and originality.

I love what I call "re-imagining," where I throw everything up in the air and let it fall in a different way. It's not the most efficient way to write a book, but it's how I find the story.

Author Brene Brown - her books inspire me to "dare greatly".

I've been waiting for someone to sign the permission slip for me to write about sex. In the meantime, I've written about sex in all my books anyway.

Objectifying your own novel while writing it never really helps. Instead, I guess while you're writing you need to think: This is the novel I want to write. And when you're done you need to think: This is what the novel I wanted to write feels like and reads like and looks like. Other people might call it sweeping or small, but it's the book you chose.

We sometimes drive ourselves crazy with how our books will be "seen," when in fact we already know what they're about, and where our obsessions are. If we can spin those obsessions into fiction, then there's a decent chance they will be "fiction-worthy," as you call it. The idea of the "sweep of ideas" is a complicated one.

Books light the fire-whether it's a book that's already written, or an empty journal that needs to be filled in.

When I wrote The Interestings, I wanted to let time unspool, to give the book the feeling of time passing. I had to allow myself the freedom to move back and forth in time freely, and to trust that readers would accept this.

Not every book is for every reader.

Back in middle school, Catherine and I had gone through this stage where all we would read were fantasy books. We'd consume them like M&M's, by the fistful, J.R.R. Tolkien and Terry Brooks and Susan Cooper and Lloyd Alexander. Susan Boone looked, to me, like the queen of the elves (there's almost always an elf queen in fantasy books). I mean, she was shorter than me and had on a strange lineny outfit in pale blues and greens.

Dear Mia, What can I say? I don't know all that much about romance novels, but I think you must be the Stephen King of the genre. Your book is hot. Thanks for letting me read it. Anyone who doesn't want to publish it is a fool. Anyway, since I know it's your birthday, and I also know you never remember to back anything up, here's a little something I made for you. It would be a shame if Ransom My Heart got lost before it ever saw the light of day because your hard drive crashed. See you tonight. Love, Michael

Don't cry." "How can I not?" I asked him. "You just said you loved me." "Well, why else did you think all of this was happening?" He set the book aside to wrap his arms around me. "The Furies wouldn't be trying to kill you if I didn't love you." "I didn't know," I said. Tears were trickling down my cheeks, but I did nothing to try to stop them. His shirt was absorving most of them. "You never said anything about it. Every time I saw you, you just acted so... wild." "How was I supposed to act?" he asked. "You kept doing things like throwing tea in my face.

For each book, I do end up making a kind of playlist to fit the characters.

Of course. I was on the run from evil spirits that wanted to kill me and now, according to the local paper, the law. Yet Richard Smith, cemetery sexton and death deity scholar, had a book for me to read in all my copious spare time.

I was the kind of kid who couldn't really stop making up stories during class. I didn't do very well academically because I was always drawing these little doodles in the margins of my notebooks and I wasn't bringing home the best grades.

I think you get so wrapped up in the book you're currently writing, it's hard to think about anything else. But I know as soon as I'm done with this book, I'll move on to something else.