Book Quotes - Page 620

All good research-whether for science or for a book-is a form of obsession.

It's this mood, these sentiments - the excitement of exploration and the surprises and delights of travel to foreign locales - that I hope to inspire with this book.

My books are not really books; theyre endless chains of distraction shoved inside a cover. Many of them begin at the search box of Pub Med, an Internet database of medical journal articles.

The broader the topic, the easier it is, not only to fill a book, but to set the bar pretty high for really great stuff.

I've read plenty of amazing science pieces where the writers don't hang out in labs. I just have fun doing it. And I get rewarded for it; I get gushy, especially when kids tell me they expected to be bored by my books, but weren't.

Many people will find this book disrespectful. There is nothing amusing about being dead, they will say. Ah, but there is.

If there's a therapist who wants a writing project, I think there's a need for a book about how the culture affects the mental health of boys.

I have trouble with some books because I'm so much in agreement with them I'd rather just sit in the grass myself.

The return to a favorite novel is generally tied up with changes in oneself that must be counted as improvements, but have the feel of losses. It is like going back to a favorite house, country, person; nothing is where it belongs, including one's heart.

It is with pain that I read of the dire effects of my book upon the minds of young girls.

When I wrote my book I wanted to love someone. I wanted to be in love. Now I know that I shall never be in love - and I no longer wish to be.

Well, if I am not vulgar, neither is my book. I wrote myself. Suggestiveness is always vulgar. But truth never. My book is not even remotely suggestive. I call things by their names. That is all.

I realized early on in writing the book that it needed to be from a family point of view, and that nobody outside the family would weigh in. And then well into writing it, the question became how to balance the perspectives; how to switch between chapters.

Dylan Landis knows how to unnerve a reader, even as she's appreciating being unnerved. Rainey Royal thrums with sex and power. A brave, exquisite book.

Many years ago I had two small children, and I wanted to be able to be home when they got home from school. And I didn't like the direction journalism was taking. I thought if I could write books, I could work at home and have the best of both worlds. I wrote my first mystery while still working full time, and it didn't sell, but the next one did sell, so I quit my job for the world of fiction. Scary, but I've never regretted it for a single day.

Age about 30, I stopped looking up my books in bookstores. Paying attention to the marketplace isn't a healthy thing for me.

I don't have a copy of my books, and the degree to which I never read them is profound. I never look.

Writing is a bit like walking into a big bookstore. It's the bookstore of your brain, and you know you're never going to read all those books. It makes you happy you're in the bookstore, and you're nervous because you know you're never going to read all those books. So the nervousness is also happy. Once I get going writing poetry is one of the happiest things I do, but it is also fraught with all of these anxieties.

It's difficult for me to imagine any scene differently because I've read the book so many times. The book, as a whole, seems like a document that wouldn't withstand any changes at this point. Or perhaps I simply can't imagine having to revise it again.

I don't know what people want, really. Does somebody have to die? What is meant by resolution? These are questions that I don't quite know what to do with. That being said, I did want the characters to be changed by the end of the book. But will what they've gone through alter their lives from this point forward, i.e. will they make different (better) choices? Probably not.

Good writing, in my opinion, is writing that looks really easy, so easy that a person who has never written more than a grocery list might convince themself that they could also write a book. That being said, it's always a lot of work, as you know. And then there's this: you have no idea how many failed stories and novels I've attempted. I have files full of stories that didn't work for whatever reason.

When I'm not working on a children's book, I'm painting abstract paintings. That's probably the most joyous thing for me as an artist. But I do love children's books.

When I illustrate a cover or a book, I draw upon what the author tells me; that's how I see my responsibility as an illustrator. J.K. Rowling is very descriptive in her writing — she gives an illustrator a lot to work with. Each story is packed full of rich visual descriptions of the atmosphere, the mood, the setting, and all the different creatures and people. She makes it easy for me. The images just develop as I sketch and retrace until it feels right and matches her vision.

Reading Stephen King's book, On Writing, was like being cornered and forced to have a long, drawn out mental enema.

When my first book came out, it was very disorienting. My health went south. I didn't know how to relate to people. I thought, "Now I have this way to be in the world that's going to be wonderful. It'll be like driving a great car, really streamlined." But it actually was difficult because, if you have a public persona, something you don't fully have control over, it's more like being in a car with controls you don't really understand.